Beirut Blues Read online

  Later that day we descend the stairs from your room eagerly; you introduce me to the doorman, asking him about a dog hit in the bombardment. We go into a confectioner’s and you draw my attention to the color of a piece of pistachio in a baklava, sing “aah” along with Umm Kulthum on the radio, sip sugarcane juice. You take me to a club in Zaitouna where the singers are tired, the dancers drunk, and the band given to surges of enthusiasm interspersed with long interludes of apathy. Each player in the band seems to have settled on a woman to favor with his attentions. He winks at her or licks his lips suggestively or passes a hand over his hair in a sort of greeting.

  You loved that club, which was almost deserted, and told me it was real, more real than any other nightclub. There is a constant popping of champagne corks, and the girls empty the remains of their drinks under the tables or in among the dead plants, unable to drink any more. You dance the tango with me, your eyes on the sea. In your jacket pocket you have some papers which you take out and study from time to time, while I watch the other customers and the musicians, embarrassed because the sight of us dancing like this must give them the feeling that we don’t take them seriously. You dance looking out to sea even though with the darkness outside and the light inside you can’t possibly see it, and in any case the glass is dirty and misted over. You close your eyes euphorically, drawing me so close that I am almost swallowed up in your breath before your body envelops me and you are whispering into my ear and my neck that you want to eat me. “You Lebanese want to destroy us. You want to drive us out.”

  Were you exaggerating? Because it seemed to me at the time that the sea of Lebanon, stretching away forever, was only for paper boats and the sky for clouds and the sun; that the snows and the birds of prey were the only spies on the mountaintops; and the hunters watching the little birds skimming over streams and plantations and declaring war on them with small shot, the only observers.

  The same sea became your obsession in the final days when accounts of what was happening in Hamra reached you at last: the fighters were preparing to leave and the backstreets had been transformed into a vast departure lounge full of luggage; all the shops had started selling bags and suitcases, and lawyers were everywhere, transferring ownership of cars and apartments from the departing fighters obliged to leave them to those who remained. They were like pupils in the school hall on the last day of the year, saying good-bye after the prizes had been distributed, signing autographs, writing lines like, “Everything passes with the passing of time except the memory, which lasts forever.”

  Did I tell you that I wrote that once to a boy in the village? I was so proud, mainly of my handwriting, but also of the fact that I knew this line by heart. He struck his head against the wall saying that I didn’t love him, and I wept in disbelief. Everyone was exchanging addresses and giving convoluted instructions. “Get in touch with so-and-so and I’ll get in touch with him as soon as I find out where I’m going to end up. Or I’ll write to your address in Lebanon. The Lebanese post is bound to start working again soon. In any case I’ll definitely write.”

  Everything was in uproar in the city’s damp heat. In one place the departing fighters were covered in flowers; flowers were stuck everywhere: in gun barrels, buttonholes, jeeps and civilian cars. When you boarded the ship, I was lying in bed thinking of a way to smuggle you out across the mountains past the houses with red-tiled roofs and green-painted windows, and the pine trees and laurels; I had absolute faith that all these things would stand with us and prevent anyone trying to drag you from your hiding place. I believed until yesterday that you would never escape by sea. You would continue to trust that the city and its labyrinths would love and protect you. I had thought about getting you a forged passport, or taking your case to the U.N., or driving you out in my car. You had shaken your head; perhaps you saw another reality: that this country was no longer open to all who descended on it, with customs officials who stamped passports and didn’t look too closely. Your intuition was sounder than mine, even though you had been shut away in that room. My car, with us on board heading for safety, looked about as secure as a cardboard box carrying two feeble wraiths bowling towards the gates of hell. I thought that my struggle to learn to drive despite Zemzem’s dream, which my grandmother interpreted as a warning to abandon the idea, had been a waste of time. For when I needed it to escape onto safe roads, it gave up in the face of the roadblocks all along the coast as far as Sidon. You told me that Alexander the Great was never so moved as when he had to take his leave of Sidon, with the color of its sea and the smell of its orange blossom, and I remember thinking at the time that this no longer meant anything when its asphalt was being pounded by huge Israeli army boots.

  When you didn’t open the door to me, I stared at its blank surface, listening to the hollow sound of my own insistent knocking. I swallowed and it felt as if my tongue had dropped into my guts. I guessed you were on the high seas, on one of the ships with hundreds of other fedayeen and I seemed to taste the sea’s salty water and choke on it. I rushed to the nearest sea I could find. Its water was colorless. I stared hard at it and looked along the horizon, but all I found there was heat and indifference. This is something that irritates me about the war: nature fulfilling its function without missing a beat. The waves continued to crash onto the same rocks, the spray boiled up and subsided. Only the sky was not its usual color, because so many bullets had been sown in it and it still bore the acrid traces of the farewell rounds fired on your behalf. You must have cursed these little hailstorms and ridiculed them, your eyes alighting briefly on the boys eagerly collecting the spent bullets, or a boy alone catching baby fish in a plastic bottle, or another clutching a faded bouquet which he was trying to sell to the departing fighters or their friends and relations. But why do things appear more serious when we read about them in history books: “They were surrounded, so that the sea was the only escape route left to them”?

  I rushed to the football stadium, the collecting point. The ululation had stopped and grains of rice and broken flowers strewed the ground. I went home dejectedly. A picture of you sitting fiddling with your papers for ages before you burned them loomed large in my mind. I was beside you, pretending to read the newspaper, and you said to me, “I’m stupid. Have I really not learned my lesson yet? Not learned that things change? There were so many people strangling this place, and suddenly they find other hands at their own throats.”

  Perhaps because of your sudden burst of confidence in the future, you didn’t want to know what I had to say or let me try to protect you, and were reluctant to accept the idea that behind my eagerness to accompany you everywhere was also a desire to be with you alone, close enough to you to smell your smell. Who would use such logic but a woman: to think of finding an opening in that busy, noisy mind of yours which appeared to be governed by a demonic force, and extract some grains of affection and desire?

  I could think only of going after you, although I realized what an absurd notion this was, for all the routes were blocked except the sea. Once more I could see nothing but the sea, nothing but the color blue.

  I had to go to you as quickly as I could. The fever to leave West Beirut had begun to spread among its inhabitants like any contagious disease, while the eastern sector reopened lines of communication and pulled down the roadblocks for us. Everyone who knew someone in the mountains, or who could afford to stay in the hotels there, left the west of the city. At night, from hotel terraces or friends’ balconies they watched it burning. They would pretend to ignore it, enjoying the quiet of the trees, but blame themselves inwardly for leaving, heartbroken at what was happening. They were upset by the indifference of the people in the east to events in the western sector and realized that their flight to safety was an illusion.

  Then I met a taxi driver who took me back to Hayat’s house from the port, where hundreds were searching for a place in a steamer or small boat. He launched into an anguished, unstoppable flow of words when he knew where I had come fro
m. The journey was not very long, but he told me the story of his life, expressing his longing for the other side of the city. There was no pressure on him to go fast, no honking horns or traffic jams to negotiate. I wished he would be quiet, and found myself almost quivering with impatience. However, he adjusted his mirror so that I could see his face, or so that our eyes met. This made me feel awkward at first, but then I couldn’t help listening.

  He was from Ain Mraisseh in the western sector, from a shacky house opposite the Ondine swimming pools. If his father caught a fish, that was their meal. They were poor: “A fishing family. Ah … if I could just see that room … The wood and earth floor, the wooden ceiling. The fishing gear hanging in the entrance. I can smell it, I know the feel of it. If only I could see the frying pan, the sink, the gutting knife.”

  I stopped trying to ask questions because when I did he just went on talking. “If only I could see the little table, the bath, the loofah. The fisherman and his wife fostered me at birth: there were ten of us and my mother couldn’t feed us anymore. She used to draw the sign of the cross on the flour when she was baking bread, and my aunt the nun made the priest bless our house on his parish visits. I lived with my adoptive father—the fisherman—and called him Baba Nikola, and his wife I called Mama Layla, so that people didn’t get mixed up, especially as I used to visit my real family every Sunday and felt like a stranger among them. Ah, mademoiselle … Madame … Mama Layla died in the war and Baba Nikola before it began.”

  I left Lebanon in an army helicopter: a relation of Hayat’s, an army officer, had pulled strings for me and so it was that anonymous hands, impersonal orders, transported me like a delicate fig and deposited me on board. My fellow passengers included several children, who made noise the whole time, despite their mother’s constant threats; the previous president of Lebanon and his wife; and one other passenger whom we recognized the moment he appeared as the Shia émigré said to have given financial support to the political parties in our sector. These parties and their allies of course had nothing but criticism for the eastern sector, whose forces were now responsible for ferrying out their benefactor.

  The émigré approached and shook hands with the ex-president and his wife, then glanced around. Smiling, he let his eyes rest on me for a moment, then sat down, lighting a cigar. The children waved the smoke away from their faces, and one of them shouted, “Mama, it smells awful. I feel sick. Mama, Mama.”

  I noticed that they spoke Arabic when they wanted to argue or complain; otherwise they could have been a family of foreigners. The country was as hard to grasp as beads of mercury: the mother of these children, judging from the way she spoke and dressed, wouldn’t acknowledge the existence of the western sector; she would be quite sure that the name Lebanon only applied to her part of the country, and yet she did not appear at all surprised that an important representative of the Shia community was on board the helicopter.

  If they had known what I was thinking and why I was here, they would probably have stopped and thrown me out. I hadn’t felt any gratitude to the army officer as he took my arm and said, “At your service, madam,” and accompanied me to the steps of the helicopter. He was the reason why you had to flee the stifling summer heat of the city on board a steamer. I checked my anger and thought again. No, he wasn’t the reason. It was Israel who had taken you away, or at least it was because of Israel that you’d gone. If you had escaped with me to Hayat’s house, you’d have been with me, proof to the political analysts that they would never be able to grasp the beads of quicksilver. Being completely bound up with one side in this war, you are against this ex-president whose thick neck bulged over his collar, against what he represents. He is against these children, who are shouting in French, “We’re bored. We’re hungry. Where’s this Cyprus? Make it hurry up. This isn’t like James Bond’s helicopter. You’re a liar, Mama.”

  These kids will grow up to fight all the things you’re committed to. Or perhaps one of them will fight on your side. And if the ex-president is blessed with children and grandchildren, they’ll make war on these children in a few years’ time, because they don’t want competition and perhaps because they want to unite the country, which I could see from the air lying like a fallen acorn.

  From Cyprus I followed you to Egypt, to the beach at Alexandria and sat on the sands unable to believe that I was by the sea, by the blue sea, waiting like a sailor’s wife or a hungry cat for the return of the fishing boats, watching the waves breaking one after the other in eager anticipation. I could hardly believe I was there, that I only left Beirut yesterday. I felt as if I have spent years between Beirut, Jounieh, Cyprus, Cairo, and Alexandria racing against time just to see you and hear you say good-bye to me.

  My friend Muna was with me, impatient for my news, or rather for news of Beirut and the siege. She had left Lebanon for Cairo at the outbreak of war, and felt guilty, but I didn’t want to stir up emotions, and felt like a traitor myself for escaping.

  I thought the ships would stop the minute they saw us, but Muna ran towards them and her daughter chased after her crying. She plunged into the water and waded forward until it reached her waist, her daughter still trying to follow her, both of them waving and shouting, but the ships slowly disappeared from view, although some people on deck waved at us. Muna’s daughter was wailing, “Pick me up. I want to see the fedayeen.”

  The ships disappeared like passing clouds, leaving me with an image of hands raised in victory salutes. I didn’t believe that ships could go by so fast. Aircraft are visible for longer and you still hear them when they’re out of sight and see the white vapor trails. The ships seemed to surface for a moment like submarines, then plunge back down to the comfort of the seabed.

  We waited impatiently for other ships. The sun had moved off our faces and off the cold drinks for sale on the beach. I began to be afraid that we might be waiting in vain, and a tiny part of me hoped we were, in case it hurt your pride if I saw you standing dejectedly on deck or rolling your sleeves up to prepare your grilled fish. I longed for all the commotion to stop, the pop and fizz of bottles being opened and the mothers shouting in fear and annoyance each time their children went near the water.

  The sun was almost submerged in the sea and the Egyptian officer came up to assure me there would certainly be other ships passing, no doubt remembering the horror on my face the previous day when they had vanished in a flash.

  The ship appeared. It was coming closer, dropping anchor, or was I mistaken? The officer pulled me by the hand and I caught hold of Muna and her daughter. Others followed us to a small boat which ferried us out to the ship. All the botded-up waiting seemed to breathe out again in that little rowboat. I thought of what I would say to you when I saw you; the conversation I had worked out before, the way I had imagined us looking at each other, had vanished into thin air. It wasn’t until I was on board the ship that I knew I had been deluding myself. You must have been on one of the other ships, or else still in Beirut. Muna was weeping bitterly as she embraced the fedayeen, and this made her daughter cry. The young men and women fighters tried to calm her down. The older men, their faces creased with fatigue and hopelessness, succeeded in quieting all those who were weeping. A young woman with deep brown skin and eyes full of life and mischief came up. “Put my mind at rest!” she said. “Is it true that in Sudan and Yemen the sun is scorching? I’m scared I’ll go even darker than I am already.”

  “Don’t worry,” said my friend reassuringly. “A month, and you’ll be back.”

  The wounded men lay on deck wrapped in civilian clothes and kaffiyehs over their battle fatigues, shivering with cold. They asked the Egyptian officer for blankets and he promised to do what he could, but did not move from where he stood. I thought I could hear Greek music, Greek voices. It was a Greek merchant ship; as far as the crew were concerned, they were just carrying a different cargo from usual. That fact shook me more than the dried blood on the deck. Isolated by having the sea as their constant companion,
these sailors appeared to look harshly on everything connected with dry land. Voices called, “One dollar. Two dollars. Coffee, tea, sandwiches.”

  I was astonished when the youths reached into the pockets of their combat gear and brought out dollars. Some stared out to sea and the others gathered around us giving us kaffiyehs and flags, live bullets and some letters to mail.

  I realized I was no longer thinking about you, forgetting you in the chaos, aware only of the ship’s decaying timbers and the voices of those around us. I clutched the letters, promising to mail them the same day. Muna and I were trying to catch the little girl who had begun to wail loudly, refusing to leave the ship, when I heard a voice calling me. “Asma, Asma.”

  It was Rana, your friend’s daughter, in black shorts. She pulled me to her, embracing me and asking if I was going with them. She looked around for you and asked me about you. I recalled her room where you had stayed for a few days and how I had refused to lie down on her bed, and remembered her whispering to me one night, when you called me into the room claiming you had something to give me, “Perhaps he’s going to kiss you.”

  My Dear Land,

  We’re setting out for you, but we still haven’t reached you. I can picture you lying under the sun and rain; you are the only thing lost in the war which is still physically present.

  I haven’t visited you since you were occupied, since your trees were cut down, and they changed your features. How hard I tried to make my grandfather leave you! But he preferred to expose himself to kidnapping, even to death, in order to stay close to you. How can someone be so attached to the inanimate? But I suppose you’re alive: you bear fruit, grow thirsty and cold; you’re changeable and not always compliant, for with your great open spaces or a small handful of your soil you’ve modified and shaped humanity; you’ve produced my family and been privy to the minutest secrets of their souls. You whispered my family’s name and the echo picked it up and went shouting among the mountains and valleys, across the plains and around the telegraph poles, until it reached Beirut; you stayed where you were, but kept close to us even in Beirut.