Next door to them lives a loyal Hezbollah supporter. He celebrates every new Assad speech with a round of shots from his rifle, shaking the whole house. He keeps a home training machine and dozens of weights on his balcony, from which neon-coloured energy-bar wrappers often flutter down. The local children love catching them.
Everyday life in Beirut is unbearable; people are getting more and more despairing, aggressive and devious. The cost of living is now higher than in London or Zurich and Amal is nearing the end of her savings.
She hasn’t managed to find any work so she calls Sami two weeks on and asks him whether the job is still going in his restaurant. He remembers her instantly and tells her she can start straight away; the other girl apparently quit just yesterday.
The restaurant is decorated with mosaic tiles and lanterns, multi-coloured tea lights, tacky mirrors and sequinned cushions, making it look like an Oriental grotto. The kitchen, on the other hand, doesn’t even have windows. Amal feels like a coalminer in there.
Sami has four waitresses working for him, all tall and slim, plus a kitchen boy and a chef. Amal’s job is to assist him. The chef is in his late fifties, with tired eyes and a large nose. His body is stocky, as though shrunk through hard work. He always keeps a bottle of arak by his side, which empties over the course of the evening. The chef is a taciturn man but still extremely irrational and frightening, so everyone works silently in his presence. When he does feel like talking he yells at one of the waitresses or fires them spontaneously – although he has no authority to do so. The owner puts up with his behaviour because the guests love his food.
On the first evening, the chef asks Amal where she’s from. She doesn’t reply and his eyes turn hard and derisive. He stands there broad-legged, far from sober.
‘I can tell anyway,’ he says, followed by an hour of ostentatious silence, his chest tautened. Amal sees a fist-sized tattoo on his biceps, a souvenir of his political convictions in the Lebanese civil war.
Later that evening, as he debones lamb shanks, sliding his knife along thigh bones, he says, ‘Your lot occupied our country for twenty years and now you’re coming back. You can’t imagine what we went through here in the civil war. We had to queue for hours for bread, there was no electricity to be had. And corpses, all the corpses in the streets. They destroyed the whole city. What you’re going through is nothing compared to our suffering.’
One horror story follows another, Amal not saying a word. She knows these stories would never be told if she weren’t there, but she also knows there’s no point comparing suffering. For two days, she feels like quitting and she envisages stabbing the chef in the belly with his knife or at least spitting in his face, but she knows she wouldn’t find a new job anytime soon, not as a Syrian. Five days later, Sami takes on two Syrian kitchen boys, one thirteen and the other ten. Amal cries when she leaves the restaurant that evening. The boys almost collapsed under the burden of work and no one could help them. She doesn’t know whether she’s crying for the boys or for herself.
Winter announces itself by its scent, and Luna comes to Beirut for a weekend visit. She’s cheerful, mentioning neither the revolution nor the depressed mood in Damascus. For Amal, her visit is a welcome distraction.
The two of them get into a shabby car with a red licence plate, a private vehicle that functions as a taxi. The driver starts by taking a slight diversion, then he claims not to know the Christian street with its many bars, until he does remember where it is in the end. He drives particularly slowly past the Hezbollah headquarters. Now and then he speaks into his phone in a subservient tone. ‘Yes, I’ve got a girl, a real jewel. But I want two hundred dollars more, she’s still a virgin. Yes, mmh, yes, two hundred. She’s between fourteen and sixteen. A virgin, definitely.’ He eyes them in the mirror and Luna instinctively pulls her skirt down over her knees.
When the taxi stops for them to get out, the driver suddenly demands three times the price. At Luna’s amazed enquiry, he merely replies, ‘Because you’re in our neighbourhood,’ and clicks his tongue ambiguously.
‘Whose neighbourhood?’ Luna asks.
He turns around to the two women and hisses, ‘Hezbollah.’
‘This area still belongs to the Sunnis,’ Amal yells, throwing a small note at him and getting out.
They continue on foot. None of the passers-by look them in the eye, apart from a group of Russian-speaking sex workers who stalk past them on high heels.
Luna has brought enough gossip along from Damascus to lighten the mood again. Amal gets recognized in a bar and a group of young men insist on taking selfies with her. They move on but leave the next bar after minutes as well because the Syrian secret service is sitting there in plain clothes, eavesdropping on the guests and filming them on their phones.
‘The bar owner is renowned for giving Hezbollah and the Syrian regime valuable tips – or at least the secret service doesn’t have to pay in his bar,’ Luna whispers.
‘How do you know that?’ asks Amal.
Luna shrugs but Amal looks closely at her friend, mistrusting her for the first time in her life. Amal has never asked Luna about her politics. Perhaps she’s afraid of the answer.
When the two of them fall drunk into Amal’s bed at dawn, Luna says she doesn’t understand Amal.
‘What don’t you understand?’ asks Amal, propping herself up on her elbow. She yawns, her eyes burning with tiredness.
‘Why you’re doing all this to yourself. And to us.’ The last words are a murmur.
Amal sits up abruptly.
‘It’s all just an Israeli conspiracy,’ says Luna. Her eyes have an unhealthy shine to them.
‘Remember how we had to swear at school every morning to fight the USA, Israel and the Muslim Brothers?’ Amal asks back.
Luna nods.
‘Why are you starting all that crap again then? We didn’t even believe that propaganda at primary school. It was less credible than Santa. And now you want to believe those tall tales, all of a sudden? What world are you living in?’
Luna starts to answer but Amal interrupts her. ‘I’m getting a glass of water.’ She leaves the bed, warm from their bodies, goes into the kitchen and turns on the tap, which no water comes out of, puts on her shoes and leaves the flat. She walks onto the street, the first people hurrying to work around her and shouting into their phones. Cars, taxis and buses so jammed that they can’t drive any faster than walking pace. The air smells of rubbish.
Amal stares at the skeleton of the building opposite, not understanding how Luna could change her position so quickly, how she could change it at all, why she’s succumbing now to the myth of an international conspiracy when she refused to believe it as a child.
Amal walks towards the shell of the hospital. She climbs over the fence, walks through the construction rubble and grit. Signs are hung on the ground floor, warning Syrian workers never to leave the premises under any circumstances.
The sun burns down mercilessly on the earth, though it’s still far from its zenith. The humidity soaks Amal’s dress in sweat. I don’t know her, I don’t know any of them, Amal thinks. They’re like strangers, only even less predictable.
By the time Amal gets home hours later, Luna has left. The bed is made, the curtains are still drawn, and it looks as though she’d never even been there.
Hammoudi wakes at dawn and washes his hands and face. For a while now, he’s been thinking about starting praying again, but what good would it do him? Even the suspension bridge collapsed a few days ago. So he shrugs on some clothes and steps out into the hospital corridor. There’s a long day ahead of him.
The corridor smells of damp and putrefaction, emanating from the broken corpses. Little Man is sitting on the operating table; Hammoudi shoos him off and he lumbers to his feet.
He knows most of his patients personally. They’re neighbours and friends trapped in Deir ez-Zor by the siege. There is neither food nor clean drinking water in the city, never mind medicines. Everything ha
s to be smuggled in, usually along the river, its current no less dangerous than the snipers on the roofs. Diseases long thought overcome have made a return – polio, typhus and cholera. Hammoudi can’t do anything to treat them. He sees children dying of common colds. Everyone has a cough, himself included. And everyone is exasperated – by the ruined buildings, the diseases, the bombs, by the cold and hunger. Most people are merely waiting for death now.
Little Man rushes back in and announces that Hammoudi’s parents’ house has been hit by a barrel bomb. Barrel bombs are water tanks, refuse containers or oil drums filled with dynamite and metal shards or other explosive material. Hammoudi knew it was only a matter of time before the house would be destroyed or occupied, so his reaction is calm. There are no patients to be treated right now; he decides to go and look at the remains.
‘Just half an hour,’ he says.
Little Man shakes his head but lets him go.
The early morning light is clear and the cold is a shock to the system. The first thing Hammoudi does is look up; no one has left the house without scanning the sky since the bombing started. A lot of them have developed an intimate knowledge of the planes. They know three MiGs will roar over their heads in the morning, coming back twenty minutes later. When there are suddenly only two of them, the locals joke about the missing pilot’s health.
Birds are still circling above the roofs but the sky promises a clear day, perfect for bombing.
The city has now been completely destroyed – the asphalt has disappeared just like the inhabitants. The walls are crumbling, riddled with holes from the constant shooting, many collapsed like cardboard. Some buildings are nothing but skeletons. In others, Hammoudi can make out traces of normal life: children’s drawings on the walls, crockery, dried-out potted plants, single shoes and family photos among rubble, waste, glass and bricks. For the first time, he realizes how many tons of brick make up a city. The walls between the houses have been knocked through so the inhabitants don’t have to go out on the streets but can move from house to house. On one street, a burnt-out bus provides protection from the snipers’ random shots.
Hammoudi remembers the carefree times in Deir ez-Zor, the picnics beneath the fruit trees in the park. He thinks of Rand, the girl he was in love with all the way through school. She had long black hair that tumbled down her back and the biggest collection of marbles in town. He once wrote her a note, which his five-year-old neighbour was supposed to give her, but even though Hammoudi bribed him with cake the boy simply rang at Rand’s front door instead of giving her the letter secretly. Rand’s mother, a very strict woman who watched over her daughter like a guard dog, immediately informed Hammoudi’s parents and made a point of complaining to the headmaster about Hammoudi’s rampant sex drive. And Rand paid less attention to him than ever.
Every part of town is blocked off by soldiers. People formed armed vigilante groups at the beginning of the revolution, to stop the army from entering their neighbourhoods. Now one part of the city is under siege by the state army and bombed every day, and the other part is still under regime control.
Hammoudi is stopped by a fighter. He barks his questions: who is he and what is he doing here? When Hammoudi answers, the man suddenly kisses him on the cheeks as though they’re old friends and apologizes, saying they’re just concerned about the locals’ safety, Hammoudi has no need to worry.
‘Are there many left?’ Hammoudi asks.
‘Only four families.’ After a brief hesitation, he asks, ‘Do you remember me?’
Hammoudi shakes his head.
‘You operated on me a few months ago.’
‘And how are you now?’ Hammoudi asks.
The man doesn’t answer, instead giving a high whistle that brings a ten-year-old boy ducking out of a ruin. He has a dirty face and looks too small for his age. The fighter tells the boy to accompany Hammoudi.
Hammoudi says, ‘I was born here, I know my way around.’
The boy grins. ‘There are snipers everywhere. You won’t get far on your own.’
The two of them set off. They pass ruined houses, burnt-out cars and looted shops. The walls are sprayed with graffiti.
The boy says he’s scared of dying alone. He’d rather be with his mother and sisters when it happens. His father died in the early days of the revolution, he says, and now he wants to follow him soon. Just not alone.
They see a man sitting by the rubble of his house, staring into space, and they pass him silently. The sun plays on the roof where a tireless sniper is concealed. There are mattresses and tubs of sand on the street, which the few remaining people use as protection from the shooting. They still get hit. The shutters of the burnt-out and looted shops are down and remains of furniture clog the narrow lanes. The goods the shops once sold are long gone, just like their owners. Only the poorest and most vulnerable have stayed.
Another fighter calls Hammoudi’s name and beckons him over. Coming closer, Hammoudi recognizes his cousin underneath the mask. He looks ten years older, though only a year has gone by since they last met. He pats the boy’s shoulder and lets Hammoudi continue alone.
Standing among the rubble of his street, the street where he was born and grew up, Hammoudi can no longer tell which house is his family home. He stares at the pile of rubble and shards.
After a while he finds the last remains of the gilt and velvet furniture. One wall, with the expensive wallpaper, the family photographs and the Arabic calligraphies, is still in one piece. He pulls out two rugs that have survived the attack and decides to take them. He throws them over his shoulder and heads back. Two hundred yards on, he puts them down on the ground and goes on without them.
Suddenly he hears helicopters. They circle above his neighbourhood like locusts, flying lower and lower, and soon the side hatches open. A huge cargo is let down. It floats slowly in the sky as if in no rush, and then a gigantic column of black smoke rises from a multi-storey residential building. The sky fills up with dust and darkness. Afterwards the walls lie collapsed, like a house of cards, between the neighbouring buildings. People run in every direction, Hammoudi sees some of them rushing to the bombsite to drag the injured and the dead from the rubble. He too runs to them. At that moment he hears a loud whistle. The whistle is a good sign; it means the grenade isn’t meant to hit you personally. Hammoudi breathes a sigh. Suddenly the ground shudders beneath his feet; Hammoudi hears nothing this time. Glass shatters and shards fly through the air. Pieces of wood shoot past him. He’s thrown against a wall and strangely enough, his last thought is of Claire. When he comes round everything is dark and quiet. Gravity has got the upper hand again. He smells garlic, old, very old garlic, chlorine and urine. Hammoudi can barely breathe, he feels like dust and rubble have settled inside his lungs. His ears are ringing. His back is nothing but pain.
There’s not a cloud in the sky, as is so often the case. It’s eleven in the morning, twenty-seven degrees, the air is heavy with exhaust fumes, cars and buses sound their horns, taxi drivers yell, fruit- and tissue sellers cry their wares. The humid air clings to people’s bodies like a damp blanket.
Amal spots Youssef at a falafel stall on the opposite side of the road. It’s a coincidental encounter and at first she considers simply walking by, but that seems silly so she goes up to him and smiles.
Youssef presents a miserable picture, his hands in his pockets, his head lowered, looking starved in shabby clothes. Luna told Amal he disappeared months ago. She thought the secret service had arrested him. Seeing him in Beirut is akin to a miracle; Amal knows only too well that very few people ever return from the regime’s torture chambers. Then again, there is no return after torture – body and spirit are equally broken. Later, Youssef will tell Amal he was arrested for driving through Mezze 86, the Alawi quarter. The security service noted down his car registration and came for him the same day. He was interrogated for three days, mainly on the subject of what he was doing in that part of town. By the time he was due to be released, his
file had turned up. Youssef has tried not to remember the rest since then.
Amal greets him with exaggerated friendliness, clearly surprising Youssef with her trusting approach. He gives her a quick, embarrassed look and then fixes his eyes on the ground. Amal’s face is radiant and clean, her hair in a neat bun, her fingernails unvarnished and cut short.
‘How long have you been in Beirut?’ she asks.
‘Only a week,’ Youssef answers hastily. Even his voice no longer sounds like him.
‘Shall we sit down?’
‘If you’ve got time,’ says Youssef.
Amal sits down while Youssef stays on his feet. It takes him a very long time to say nothing.
‘I’ve got to go to work in a minute,’ she says, instantly overwhelmed by guilt.
Youssef simply shrugs.
‘I’d like to see you later,’ she says, hesitant. She doesn’t quite understand where this sudden desire for Youssef has come from but she doesn’t want to let him go.
‘Amal, this isn’t the time for declarations of love.’
Amal laughs and Youssef watches her brush a strand of black hair behind her ear, and then he asks her at last. ‘When do you finish work?’
‘I don’t know exactly,’ she says quietly. ‘What are your plans?’
Youssef shrugs again.
‘Here, take my key,’ she says barely audibly, and when Youssef doesn’t react she whispers, ‘Please. I don’t know exactly when I’ll get off work. I work in a kitchen and I don’t want to stand you up. My flatmates aren’t here, they’re visiting their parents in Damascus. I’ll write down my address and the code for the door. It’s not far. Youssef, please, wait for me there.’ As she speaks she takes Youssef’s hands. They’re both aware this is a gesture Amal learned at the institute. Youssef’s hands go limp in Amal’s.
It’s well after midnight when she gets home that evening. Youssef is sitting in the kitchen – there’s a bowl of salad on the table and a dish of fresh bread. Amal smiles and uncorks the wine she stole from the restaurant. They eat without talking much. Amal knocks back two glasses of wine. She’d like to apologize to Youssef but she can’t remember what for. Frustrated, she pushes her glass away.
City of Jasmine Page 12