‘Mama, please sit down. I’ll take care of it.’
They sit, Waddad and Samir, at the kitchen table, unsmiling and facing each other. There is nothing awkward in the way she looks at him.
‘I’ve been wondering about you ever since Aneesa told me you were here,’ Waddad begins. ‘You see, she never talked about you before, only your father. God have mercy on his soul.’
She stops and waits for Samir to say something. He is younger and more vulnerable-looking than she had expected.
‘Aneesa meant a great deal to my father,’ he says. ‘He was sorry when she left. We both were.’
Waddad nods and scratches her head. Her hair is grey and cut close to her head like a cap.
‘I thought she’d stay there for ever,’ she says with a smile. ‘But then you can never tell with my daughter.’
Samir watches Aneesa as she lifts the lid of the pot, dips a teaspoon into the mixture inside and tastes it.
‘It’s too salty, Mother,’ Aneesa says.
Waddad turns around to look at her.
‘The stew, mama. You’ve put too much salt in it again.’
Waddad turns back to Samir and shakes her head.
‘She’s teaching me how to cook now,’ she says with a chuckle. ‘Why don’t you stay and have lunch with us?’
There are many things that Samir thinks about when he is alone, things that console him, like the certainty of another day as morning breaks or the sight of the sea, flat and constant, from his balcony, but these are the comforts that loneliness recalls. Being with people once again, two women in a crowded kitchen filled with meals past and present, with words said out loud and late-night musings, he realizes how silent his days are: spaces between his heart and the surrounding air that he is unable to fill.
‘I would love to,’ he finally says.
Aneesa joins them at the table feeling anxious. She knows her mother is curious to find out more from Samir and is afraid Waddad will say something to upset him.
‘Will you stay here, do you think?’ Waddad asks. ‘In Beirut, I mean.’
‘He doesn’t know yet, mama,’ Aneesa says quickly. ‘He’s got a lot to sort out first.’
‘I know. I meant after he’s through with all that.’
Samir puts a hand on Aneesa’s arm and feels some of her anxiety dissipate through his fingers.
‘I’m not sure yet what I will do. I have been going through the flat, my parents’ things. It makes me happy at times and at others afraid.’
Waddad nods.
‘Everything reminds me of them, even strangers I meet in the street bring back memories of my mother and father, in their look or manner,’ Samir continues. ‘They are with me here as they have never been before.’
Samir has placed his hands before him, clasped loosely together so that Aneesa can see the tablecloth through the spaces between the curves of his fingers and the hollow between his wrists. Her mother leans forward and looks up at him before she speaks.
‘But, habibi, that’s exactly how you should be feeling.’
The shop is not far from the main shopping street. Aneesa glances at the window display – mannequins in men’s clothing, shirts and trousers and leather jackets of an indefinable style – before walking inside. It has been such a long time since they last met that she is not certain she will recognize Khaled, an old friend of her brother’s.
The man behind the counter is talking on a mobile phone. He looks up and smiles before ending his conversation and coming towards her. He is of medium height, wears thick glasses and his hairline is clearly receding so that his forehead seems unusually high.
‘Hello, Khaled,’ Aneesa says.
The man approaches and looks intently at her.
‘Aneesa! What a nice surprise to see you here! How are you?’ He embraces her and then stretches out his arms to gaze at her. ‘Don’t tell me you’ve come back to this godforsaken place when the rest of us are trying to leave,’ Khaled says, shaking his head. ‘Come and sit down, please.’ He pulls out two chairs from behind the counter and places them in the middle of the shop.
‘I don’t want to get in the way,’ Aneesa says as he gestures for her to take a seat. ‘I just didn’t know where else to find you and then remembered your father’s shop.’
‘When did you get back?’ Khaled asks.
‘It’s been a while now. I’m staying with my mother. How about you? How is your family?’
‘The children are almost grown up now,’ he says, shaking his head. ‘Twelve and thirteen years old and they’re enrolled in the same school Bassam and I went to.’
Khaled had been Bassam’s closest friend. They went to school and university together and Aneesa suspected had also been involved with the same political group during the war. She had never quite understood the friendship because the two of them were so different, Bassam an idealist and Khaled with his two feet firmly planted on the ground. But after her brother’s disappearance, Aneesa had turned to Khaled for help. When she eventually went away, she had relied on him to deliver the letters to her mother.
‘Oh, Aneesa, it must be ages since we last spoke,’ Khaled interrupts her thoughts. ‘How is your mother? I haven’t been to see her in a while. It’s my fault, I know.’
‘The shop has certainly changed,’ she says, looking around her at the well-stocked shelves and rails.
‘Would you believe we used to do better during the war? Business is getting more difficult every year.’
The street door opens and a customer walks in. Khaled goes up to him.
‘Can I help you?’
The young man says he is looking for a pair of socks in pure cotton and Khaled helps him choose them. As he wraps the socks up and gives the young man his change, Khaled turns to Aneesa.
‘I’ll just be a moment,’ he says.
Khaled believes he knows why Aneesa has come to see him and is glad of having a moment or two with a customer to think about what he will say to her.
‘Did you ever find out anything new, Khaled, about Bassam, I mean?’ Aneesa asks once the young man has left.
He shakes his head.
‘Don’t you think I would have let you know if I had?’
‘But I wasn’t here. I thought …’
‘No, but Waddad is. I certainly would have gone to her.’
‘But you must know something,’ Aneesa protests. ‘You were his best friend.’
Khaled leans forward and puts an arm over her shoulders.
‘I told you everything I knew at the time, Aneesa,’ he says gently. ‘We looked for him until there was no place else to look, you know that. But it was no use in the end.’
Aneesa gets up, pushing her chair back.
‘I keep going over it in my mind, Khaled, and it just doesn’t make sense. He can’t have disappeared so completely, as though he’d never existed.’
‘It doesn’t have to make sense, Aneesa. Nothing about the war ever made any sense.
All those deaths, all that suffering, it was madness.’
‘You think he was killed?’
Khaled hangs his head and takes a deep breath. He has pictured in his mind so many times what might have happened to his friend. He knows enough of what went on during those terrible years to hope that Bassam had not suffered too much before he died.
‘You must think that too, Aneesa,’ he says slowly.
‘I know he’s no longer alive. I know that, Khaled. I just want to know what happened. How it happened. I thought you might be able to help me.’
He stands up and leans closer to her. He had almost forgotten about Bassam’s disappearance in the few years since the end of the war and realizes there is something in him that resents being reminded of it now.
‘Habibti, we may never know what happened. You have to stop thinking about it, Aneesa, for your mother’s sake if not your own.’
Aneesa fetches her handbag from the back of the chair where she left it and puts it over her shoulder.
> ‘In the mountains, they believe that those who die a violent death always return,’ she says. ‘My mother takes comfort in that.’
‘Perhaps you can too,’ Khaled says.
Aneesa shakes her head as she steps out.
Aneesa has never thought of her upbringing as different from the rest of her generation but there are things about this new Beirut that no longer seem right so that she sometimes feels out of place where she least expects to.
She loves Hamra Street, as she always did, its smallness that once seemed limitless, its tired poor who reach out for money from their seats on the pavement, the clothing boutiques that do not interest her and the sales-women who look her up and down; she even likes her awkwardness and the way she knows she no longer fits in among those who have experienced a different Lebanon: all these things make her take comfort.
But lately, walking to her favourite bookshop or sitting in a pavement café, Aneesa senses an unspecified dissatisfaction, a faltering malaise that cannot be shaken off and which she cannot be sure belongs to her alone.
Being with Salah had taught her a great deal, a kind of amazement at the details of everyday life that she seems now to have lost, the ability to view everything delicately as if any roughness even in thought would strip it of its true self.
He offered a different kind of life for her in his stories and in his tenderness, pausing when there was a need to wait for breath and applying the same intent when he spoke as he did when listening. She’d felt at times a light illuminating her confusion so that what would have been arduous became a thing of ease, and what she might have feared she later met with courage. She misses him not because she longs to see or touch him again but because the thought of an empty place where he once stood, of silence where he spoke and blindness where he once saw, of indifference in place of his passion and distance where once there was closeness, devastates her.
She sighs and reaches for the small red radio that once belonged to Bassam, wishing her friend was with her. This, she thinks bending over to look closely at the radio, is what Salah would do. She lifts a hand and slowly turns the tuning dial, her ear listening for an easing of static, here, no not yet, or maybe there, yes, that’s clearer, until the voice of an announcer can be heard without interference. There, Aneesa thinks, leaning her head back against the armchair she is sitting in, her eyes closing slowly. That is how Salah would have done it, deliberately and without apprehension at what he might have once missed.
‘My mother just wasn’t that kind of person,’ Samir says, reaching further into the bottom of the cupboard. ‘She didn’t really have the patience for showing tenderness.’
He pulls out several pairs of women’s shoes and places them on the floor. They are so covered with dust that he cannot even tell what colours they are. Aneesa holds out a large rubbish bag and motions for Samir to put the shoes inside it but he hesitates.
‘I want to look at them for a minute,’ he says. ‘Besides, there’s more in there. Let me get them all out.’
He is sitting on the floor. His head and the top half of his torso disappear into the cupboard again.
‘That’s not what I was asking you about,’ says Aneesa, still standing with the bag open in her hand.
‘What?’
Samir pulls his head out again and looks up at her. His hair has dust on it and he is blinking because the dirt has also gone into his eyes. He sneezes and Aneesa giggles.
‘What did you say?’
‘I asked you how you felt about your mother when she was alive.’
Samir throws another pile of shoes on the floor and sits up on his knees. Besides the dust, Aneesa can see and smell mould on some of the shoes. She watches Samir pick up a shoe and wipe it with the back of his sleeve. It is black patent leather and has a clip-on satin bow at the front. Samir pulls on this and grunts when it comes off.
‘I remember this pair,’ he says without looking up. ‘She wore them with a black beaded gown that I used to love.’
He turns the shoe to the side and Aneesa notices the thick, high heel and rounded toe. She gasps softly when Samir lifts the shoe up and drops it into the bag.
‘They’ll all have to go, I suppose,’ he says with a sigh. ‘None of them is in good enough condition to give away.’
Aneesa lifts the ends of the bag up and opens her arms wider as Samir proceeds to throw the shoes inside. She knows he is finding the task of getting rid of his parents’ things difficult and wishes there were some way of consoling him. But for the past two days, he seems to have withdrawn further into himself. He no longer answers her questions directly and often sounds as though he is speaking to himself in an empty room.
‘It’s this house,’ Samir says as he watches Aneesa tie the ends of the rubbish bag together. ‘I feel alone in it even when there is someone else here with me.’
Aneesa looks at him as he stands up. He knows he has been especially distant since he first asked her to help him clear up the flat. Sometimes, friendship feels like a skill that he does not possess, so delicate are the bonds that bring people together, so fine the emotions connected to them. He would like to reach out and touch Aneesa’s hair but does not dare to.
‘Look, why don’t we stop for a while?’ Samir asks. ‘I’ll wash my hands and find us something to drink. Just leave the bag there, Aneesa. I’ll deal with it later.’
When Aneesa used to imagine herself in this flat, it was as a visitor in Salah’s home. She feels his absence here keenly but has no memories of him moving through these rooms, cannot see the lines his footsteps once made or the shadows that preceded them. Instead, watching Samir as he walks out of his mother’s bedroom, dejection in his shoulders and in the sigh he leaves behind, she realizes that he is what she will remember most about this place, his seeming helplessness and the sensibility he has sought to hide.
She goes out to the enclosed balcony and, because it is slightly chilly, puts on the jumper that is tied around her shoulders. It is early afternoon and the traffic on the Corniche is not as heavy as it was earlier in the day. Still, the sound of car engines is a definite if distant drone, strangely comforting because it is so much a part of Beirut.
Samir comes out to sit with her.
‘Your father gave me a painting before I left,’ Aneesa says.
‘I remember it. It was one of his favourites.’
‘Where did it hang here, do you know?’
Samir shrugs.
‘I don’t remember where he had it. But it was one of the few things he insisted we take with us to London.’
‘I think you should have it now.’
‘He meant for you to keep it, Aneesa.’
‘I only took it because I promised myself I’d give it back to him once he returned.’ She tried to recall details of the painting that now hung on the wall opposite her bed but saw only a splash of bold colour and floating wings that seemed to lift the picture upwards.
‘It’s an angel, isn’t it?’ Samir asks.
‘Yes.’
Samir shifts in his chair.
‘He talked about the painting once after he fell ill,’ he says. ‘He said it had given him great comfort when Mother died. ‘He believed …’ Samir hesitates.
‘Yes?’
But Samir only shrugs his shoulders. Salah had never spoken of religion to Aneesa. Yet he had had a quietness about him that made her think of the enduring silence of an empty church in winter and the exquisite symmetry in the outlines of a mosque against a barren landscape.
‘Why do you think he gave the painting to me?’ she eventually asks.
Samir crosses his arms in front of him and looks out towards the sea.
‘I expect he must have thought you needed that angel more than he did.’
Ramzi likes coming down to Beirut. He enjoys staying in a flat that overlooks the sea and prefers the corners and empty spaces in its rooms to the long, crowded dormitories at the orphanage. As soon as he and Waddad arrive on Friday afternoon, he rushes t
o the bedroom, puts his backpack down on the floor and goes out again on to the balcony to look down at the empty car park. Then he rushes the hallway and wheels his bicycle to the front door.
‘I’m going downstairs for a bit,’ he calls out to Waddad.
‘It’s too late now, habibi,’ Waddad says as she emerges from the kitchen. ‘I don’t want you out playing at this time of night.’
Ramzi cannot understand why she should think he would not be safe in the dark.
‘But look outside.’ He points towards the windows in the living room. ‘It’s still daytime.’
‘Ten minutes then,’ Waddad says, shaking her head. She walks back into the kitchen and puts her apron on. Ever since Ramzi’s visits began she has had to think about cooking again, substantial meals that they sit at the dining room table to eat, she and her daughter and the young boy.
Tonight, they will have kafta, minced meat mixed with parsley and spices which she spreads out flat in a rectangular pan. She peels and slices a few potatoes and places the pieces on top of the meat, pours tomato paste diluted in hot water over it and puts the pan into the oven, then she goes to the sink and picks up the sponge to clean the dishes and utensils she has just used.
It almost feels like it did when her husband was still around and the children had been young. In her mind’s eye, she sees her husband sitting in an armchair in the living room, perhaps watching television or reading one of the leather-bound books he kept on the bookshelf in the hallway. Although he had not been a smoker, he would sometimes puff on a cigar that someone had given him and the waft of smoke would weave its way to the kitchen, around her head and into her hair.
The front door slams shut. Waddad listens for footsteps.
‘Marhaba,’ Aneesa comes up to her and kisses her on the cheek.
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