Beirut Blues Read online

  You stood watching the water come to the boil, while I tried unsuccessfully to express something other than my embarrassment. As I drove off I felt that an abyss had opened up behind me.

  But then Beirut was plunged into its own war and I found I was pulled down into the abyss with you from the moment I saw you again, sitting in a newly opened restaurant in a residential street. Because of its position, this restaurant was unlike any other of the city’s multitude of restaurants, and strangely out of keeping with its surroundings: the concept of war simply vanished from all our minds as soon as we stepped over the threshold. We piled onto the seats near the window, watching the passersby, convinced we were somewhere safe, inviolable, even when the world outside was rocked by explosions. The circumstances of war colored the personality of the regulars, whether they were intellectuals who had stayed on in the country, ex-combatants, or those still actively engaged in the fighting. Powerful relationships were quickly formed in those circumstances, and disintegrated at the same speed, but the curiosity to find out what lay behind new names and faces remained undiminished as social circles in the city became increasingly restricted.

  You rose to your feet as soon as you saw me and reached out your arms to embrace me like a father reunited with his long-lost daughter, but I suspected that the turmoil of this new war had changed you. I could distinguish that special smell, which I must have retained in my memory since the ’67 war, accompanying the kiss which I had planned in advance. I expected some burning emotion to be rekindled between us, but the kiss ended quickly and there was no aftermath.

  Another few years have passed and you knock back the whiskey as I sit watching you, and seem tense and out of sorts. I wish you would go back to being your old self. I don’t mean full of optimism, convincing yourself that the war is bound to take conflicting paths, that those guns are just noises, the fires colors, the black red, the dead merely statistics in newspapers. I just want the old Naser.

  I sit watching you, knowing that I am your newspaper and bringer of bad news. I have become your only link with the outside world, an owl screeching with foreboding, looking at you with unblinking eyes. I tell you about the people who have taken refuge on the stretch of beach off the Corniche between the British and American embassies, and about the rifles abandoned on the sands at the knees of a mother or wife in case a fighter comes back from the sea, about the backgammon tables, about how people are scrambling to get food, water, generators, and kerosene lamps. When I go on to describe an international football game, you explode: “I know. Do you think I’m deaf? What do you think all the radios in the neighborhood are for?”

  I grew to hate this task of mine, and so I didn’t tell you how committees and fronts were being formed to administer food supplies, baking, welfare clinics, publications, for you would have taken this as an indication of just how futile your efforts had been. I stopped going into detail about what I’d seen or felt. Your presence was a dead weight: every time I wanted to stay with you, you shocked me by your desire for your own company, and whenever I stayed at home I had the idea you were clutching onto me, even at a distance, so that I’d transmit some of my freedom to you. I wanted to be close to you, my longing for you flowing from me and coming to a halt in my fingertips. But your silence inhibited me from approaching you and I sat dumb and distant, reproaching you inwardly for not accepting me and sticking with me. I saw you as a grasshopper, never still, alighting here and there. I used to take off your shirt, which you hadn’t changed for a week, your trousers, your underpants, feeling your breathing on my neck. As you paced up and down like a panther shut up in a birdcage, I felt the weight of your body on mine. The words spilled out of you like foam and I nodded my head and closed my eyes.

  I was naïve to think I had become responsible for you. I used to keep quiet about what I’d heard and seen: the crowds out on the streets reminding me of feast days in my childhood; the games of chance people were playing. Are you staying or leaving? Are you going to live or die? Who will be the unlucky one this time? Or is this a lottery everybody loses?

  But you seemed to have been blessed with X-ray vision, for I arrived one day and sat on the couch, breathing heavily, closing my eyes, pretending to be tired, and instead of asking what had happened, you poured kerosene over your papers in the middle of the room, set light to them, and stood back and watched them disappearing in the flames. You remained motionless until the fire began to spread a little. I wanted to tell you about the fire my mother had caused at the time of my father’s death. I wanted to make you feel well disposed towards me so that you would forgive me for what I had thought on my way to see you. As I raced through Harj Beirut I had been confronted by tree stumps and charred embers instead of the dappled green canopy of pines. Sobbing, I continued on my way over the blackened road, thinking that perhaps the Palestinians ought to go; then the sky would not be full of Israeli aircraft leaving their mark on everything. I know. I know that if they went, you’d go with them. But I didn’t want Beirut to change so much that we no longer recognized it. Its skies were being transformed by the colored leaflets the Israelis dropped, dancing in the air, instead of paper airplanes and clouds. But were they Israeli planes dropping leaflets from the sky, or “flights of birds striking us with stones of baked clay” as if we were Ethiopians threatening Mecca in the Qur’an?

  The sidewalk was riddled with holes, big and small, but it was still a Beirut sidewalk. People still walk in the streets of Beirut; their eyes register the wrecked buildings, the broken glass, the burned trees. The toy shop has become a roast chicken take-out. The barbershop is closed forever, boarded up with sheets of metal. But do they want Beirut to disintegrate completely?

  At this point I stopped thinking, still watching the fire with you as it died down and the papers turned to ashes. Among them lay the hopes and wishes which had accompanied the words; the days and nights which were no longer any use for encouraging the spread of logic and faith and conducting internal debates; the arteries which blocked any attempt to inject new life into them, or even to restore life to how it used to be in the past. You see your friend shutting his door in your face, apologizing for being unable to give you a roof for the night in case the building becomes a target, because he knows you’re on the run. This shocks you because your friendship wasn’t based on talking and going to the movies together, but on a shared vision of the future which you were committed to realizing together. And you must have noticed in my eyes the pressure I anticipated from your continuing presence in Beirut. Is it possible that you could become a burden to me and the city, as if you were not Naser who has been my consuming passion for so long? I need your heartbeat to keep me alive. I have to be so close to you that our limbs intertwine and our breath mingles and forms a single protective layer against an unknown terror. You must remember that night, three or four days before you left? You sighed and said, “I’ve got a craving for ice, a lot of ice, with my whiskey.”

  We walked out of the Commodore Hotel, swaying slightly from the whiskey and red and white wine we’d drunk, trying to work out whose apartment you had arranged to spend the night in. Then you asked me to get back into the car and drive us to the clinic. I drove as if I were in a dream and parked and got out, still half dreaming, for the city was dark and peaceful, despite sporadic bursts of shelling. We entered a room where the nurses were playing cards with doctors and a few patients. We exchanged jokes with them, then you asked for some ice for your whiskey. It was reserved for cooling their instruments, but they sliced a bit off the slab for you. We didn’t bother looking for the apartment where you were meant to stay. Instead we went to visit an artist friend. The door of his house was open, as if he knew he would have a lot of visitors. We walked into the living room, which was overflowing with young people, especially girls sitting in untidy groups on the floor with their belongings scattered around them, making it look like a school common room. You sat sipping the iced whiskey you’d brought with you, while I talked to someone who
said it was suffocating in there and why didn’t we go out on the balcony? It was as if our arrival had reignited dying embers, for the music blared out again and the girls got up to dance to it and some of them gyrated where they sat on the floor. The very moment that the youth reached out a hand to feel my breast through the opening of my shirt, I happened to glance through a doorway and see your friend’s daughter resting her head on your chest while you stroked her hair affectionately. Was she crying? She must have been afraid. The boy’s hand played with my nipple while Beirut lay under siege and watchful eyes stared intently through telescopes at weapons attacking the city from land, sea, and air. Everything faded as the music died, except the boy’s hand squeezing my breast. I was aware of nothing except the blackness encircling the city. Once again the living room looked like a room in a girls’ boarding school. As you came back in, I saw you patting the girl on the shoulder. You heaved a sigh of relief when you caught sight of me, but you made sure you held her to you, touching her face affectionately, gathering her hair up on either side of her head, and then you said to me in a whisper as we went down the stairs, “She’s scared.”

  You told me how her hand had gone around your waist and you’d stopped her and told her to put her head on your shoulder. I was silent. I didn’t tell you about the young man touching my breasts. We never discussed things like that. The sound of Israeli guns reverberated from battleships out at sea as we climbed the stairs to an attic room in one of the buildings we knew. The darkness was intense, perhaps because so many people were sleeping on the staircases. The children were sound asleep or too tired to make a noise, so the only sound was the grown-ups mumbling to themselves; some seemed to be in the depths of despair, and others were philosophical. A woman hung on to your leg and I thought you had tripped over her and were bending down to apologize. But she lifted her face up to yours and her moist hand clung around your neck. As soon as we were back inside the room you began to talk and talk, never stopping to listen or ask a question or reply to one of mine. I was happy you were favoring me with your confidences, as you punctuated your sentences with “See what I mean, my love,” but equally I doubted if I really was your love and not just part of the Beirut scenery. I felt you were addressing the city because you would be pulling out anytime. Still, I let you talk and listened to you as if we’d only just met, as if we had days and nights of intimate conversation ahead of us. I had the sudden painful sense that the frenzy and noise of Beirut had dominated our lives, never leaving us time to talk as we were talking now. I reached out my hand to yours, but I knew it was like a borrowed hand. I looked at my watch. You were annoyed. “Are you going somewhere?” you asked. Actually I had been unable to believe how quickly the time was rushing past. You knew and I knew that it would soon be time for you to leave the country and that with it you would be leaving the warmth you had felt since your first night here in a village guesthouse heated by the sleeping animals.

  You had come with your uncle’s family in 1948 on a trip from your village to a place called Lebanon, which you had thought was just another of the many orchards you had passed through, walking, running, or taking turns on the horse with your uncle’s wife and son. When the trip showed no sign of coming to an end, you were convinced your father had sent you away to escape the revenge of two British soldiers whose resplendent uniforms you had accidentally splattered with mud.

  But the journey went on through these lands called Lebanon after the rest of your family had joined you and your mother had kissed you and pressed you to her, repeating that she had come after you because she’d missed you so much. Then you began to live in a room with running water instead of the guesthouse and the convent, and you went to a new school and acquired a new name: Naser the Palestinian.

  “I’ll have to kill myself. No, I must keep going. It doesn’t matter which I do, since both will have the same result: surrender. Keeping going doesn’t mean that I present any threat to the Israelis. It means moving on, leaving all my hopes behind me, forgetting everything that’s happened. Suicide is a gesture of pride which I’m not fit to make.”

  This monologue of yours went on unabated, although I sometimes thought you were wanting me to participate. But as soon as I opened my mouth, you went on talking as if you had just been pausing for breath. Meanwhile I began to conclude for the first time that dialogue had died, not just between you and me, but of itself. I had an uncanny sensation that you had already been snatched away from me and I was sitting with someone else who resembled you and had taken over your name and way of talking, and it was this other person who was thinking of fleeing to a country where they had never heard a word of Arabic and changing his name, or settling in a Gulf state surrounded by wealth. You confused the words for wealth and revolution, which sound similar in Arabic, and I said it was not a slip of the tongue, but a slip of the soul. You didn’t laugh but looked up into the city sky as if you were bidding yourself farewell, having given in to your other half. For you had split in two, one part of you wanting to know what was going on outside, the other resigned to the routine of this solitude which hardly touched you. You had cut yourself off from your command and no longer tuned in to hear your instructions or find out what had happened to the others. The veins throbbed in your temples. “Are the Lebanese afraid Israel will finish them off, or have they lost faith in us?” you asked, as if you were thinking aloud. Although Beirut looked like a shadowy network of narrow streets and alleys from the balcony, it was exposed as minutely as if it were under a microscope. Overnight it seemed to have changed from a beautiful friend, whose boundaries were the sea, the sky, and the trees, to a magnet which drew out even the pins hiding in nooks and crannies.

  Was this really the same Beirut which has always been like a ball of many colors rolling along? Bronzed faces, immodest bathing costumes, cars bearing splendid names, theaters and movie houses, cafés and sports clubs; women with dark eyes ringed with kohl, world-famous singers, artists, girls on motorbikes. Modern apartments—some shuttered, others with their windows wide open—in tall buildings like capsules, floating in a vacuum, whose inhabitants only ever saw the blue sea. And the old quarters too, where familiar cooking smells hung around the staircases, and from the balconies came the sound of carpets being beaten. The contradictions made the inhabitants of Beirut seem eternal.

  I used to watch the high life breathlessly from a distance, not daring to move in close. I was too well aware that I was not comfortable with it. I didn’t want to stop being critical, despite my fascination, so I expressed my disapproval of the wealth and at the same time coveted the material which reminded me of pictures of palaces in Venice, and dreamed endlessly of having an emerald-colored lamp for my dressing table. What stopped me approaching the glittering Beirut was the crush of people around it: women and girls who seemed like princesses with their hairstyles, clothes, and haughty calm—a way of moving which betrayed self-confidence and experience—and men who went in for foreign culture whether they lived abroad or stayed in Lebanon. I used to ask myself why I hesitated and didn’t plunge in like them and pounce on everything new that came from outside, whether it was to my taste or not.

  Was it the same place I discovered through you? With the outbreak of war it was as if the country had announced it was staging an international fair, and representatives of various organizations, fighters, and journalists poured in the moment the celebrations began. Their ideas and muscle power flowed over its open borders, and a relationship which began in the heart and mind sometimes extended to the pocket. Also those who thought of Lebanon before the war as a rich tart living off immoral earnings, because of the gleam of money and gold and the luxurious hotels, and thought that she must be heading for ruin, came to see Beirut become more human; no longer sparkling like a jewel, it started to suit the likes of my grandmother and Zemzem.

  My father should come back to life now: the city would understand him better, understand why he used to go around the restaurants and bring back the leftovers. The
popular cafés that cling to the mouth of the sea belong to a city with soul. Even the alley cats have become real cats, catching flies, missing an eye or a leg. You took me around and introduced me to my city which had begun to pulsate with life like cities with long histories, Cairo for example. Characters emerged who seemed eternal and had some kinship with the half-collapsed walls; apartments which previously dreamed only of the smell of food and the rustle of soft dresses became houses for convictions, ideas, where people could breathe freely and make love. You sat me in front of people peacefully smoking hookahs, or selecting fish and savoring the air, and this great serenity seemed to pass between them and the waves. I was like a bee, discovering the honeycomb city with you. I sat facing the sea, the hookahs bubbling around me, and found I was not distracted by the images of devastation and dead bodies the way I used to be.