Beirut, Beirut

by Sonallah Ibrahim

Suddenly, Marwan addressed me: “Did you hear what Sadat said yesterday to a female reporter from the Jerusalem Post?”

  I shook my head. Wadia leaned over and said, “I read about it. He mentioned that he was about to make an important political decision.”

  “He described the decision as being a historical step,” Marwan added. “I wonder what he means.”

  “The only thing left is joining NATO or signing a joint defense agreement with Israel,” I said.

  One of the people around the table mentioned the name of Ziad al-Rahbani and the conversation turned to his new play called An American Feature Film. I asked Nazar what the name meant and he explained that it was taken from television programs, where the late-night feature film is usually described that way.

  “Ziad is completely finished,” Marwan added, in his cutting, peremptory manner. “He’s had nothing new to say ever since the heavy fighting ended.”

  “He was with the left at the time,” Wadia explained to me.

  “And now?” I asked.

  “No one knows where he stands,” he replied.

  I filled my glass as I looked at the guests around the table. I asked myself how much of what Wadia just said applied to each one of them.

  Chapter 13

  The amount I had to drink didn’t give me what I considered to be a deep, uninterrupted slumber. I heard Wadia leaving the house early in the morning, but afterwards, I couldn’t get back to sleep.

  I finally got out of bed, feeling sluggish. I washed my face and had breakfast. I made myself a big cup of coffee. Then I sat down to go over the scenes I had recorded from the film. A little before noon, the phone rang.

  I picked up the receiver and heard Lamia’s voice.

  “How are you? Did I wake you up?”

  “Not at all,” I replied.

  “What are you doing today? Will one of Beirut’s ladies be keeping you busy?”

  “The only Beirut lady I know is you.”

  She laughed.

  “Did you read the book?” I asked her.

  “I read a large part of it. But we can talk about that later. What would you say if I were to invite you to lunch?”

  “I’d be honored,” I said.

  “I’ll stop by to see you an hour from now.”

  “But without an escort,” I added.

  She laughed. “I’ll try,” she said. “In any case, today is everyone’s day off.”

  I described for her where the house was, and hung up. I lit a cigarette and looked for the bottle of French cognac that Wadia had bought two days previously. I poured a glass of it and sniffed it with pleasure. I took a sip and held it in my mouth for a moment before swallowing.

  I went to the bathroom, looked at my face in the mirror, and felt my chin. I shaved, but the reflection that looked back at me hadn’t improved much. After taking a quick shower, I felt invigorated. The sky was thick with clouds and there was a cold bite in the air, so I put on all my clothes and sat down, drinking my glass of cognac in the living room.

  My glass was empty so I poured myself another. No sooner had I finished it than the sound of a zumur – as the Lebanese call a car horn – came up to me from the street. I heard it again, so I hurried to the balcony. I saw her head sticking out of the driver’s window in a white two-seater car. I waved down to her and hurried inside, after locking the door to the balcony. I took a swig straight from the cognac bottle, then went down to the street.

  She opened the car door for me, and her perfume wafted lightly over me, surrounding me as I settled in beside her. She was wearing white pants and a silk blouse of the same color. Over her shoulders she had a pink wool vest. Her hair was gathered to the side in a single bunch that rested on her chest. Around her neck was a thick pearl necklace.

  The car headed toward Raouché. Cold air came at me through the window, so I felt around for the handle to roll it up, but she stopped me, saying: “Don’t trouble yourself with that.”

  Putting out a red-nailed finger, she pressed a button in front of her, and the door window began to rise on its own.

  She pressed another button, and music from The Godfather poured out of the speakers. I relaxed in my seat, looking at the empty streets and the locked shops plunged in silence.

  “If you stay with us until Christmas,” she said, “you’ll enjoy the snow.”

  “I don’t like it much,” I replied.

  “Me, I love it. I’d love to go to Moscow.”

  She turned toward me and looked at me as if to ask what I thought about that.

  “Moscow is a city worth seeing,” I said.

  “Can you get me an official invitation?”

  I stared at her in confusion.

  “Who do you think I am? The Comintern’s agent in the Middle East?”

  “Don’t you take money from them?”

  “Of course.”

  We drove through several streets before the sea revealed itself to us, and we stopped under a prominent sign for a restaurant.

  I asked her if she had a button to open the door. “Not yet,” she replied, laughing.

  We got out of the car, and she walked ahead of me to the restaurant’s entrance, taking elegant, flirtatious steps. I followed her, observing the movement of her behind in her tight pants.

  We walked through the entrance to a wide garden that was divided into separate groves, each of which had several comfortable chairs and a wide rattan table.

  We were almost the only patrons, and several servers waited graciously on us with impeccable refinement. We ordered arak and grilled meats. Soon the table was filled with plates of tabbouleh, kibbeh, hummus, tahini, red radish, green mint and yogurt.

  I tossed down a glass of arak, while she was content with a single sip.

  “The problem with your book,” she declared, “is that distributing it is nearly impossible.”

  “Why?”

  “There isn’t a single Arab regime you haven’t implicated; and then of course, there’s a great deal of sex in it.”

  I lit a cigarette. “I mentioned all that to Adnan in my correspondence with him. But he didn’t object to any of it.”

  “I don’t think he imagined you would be going as far as you did.”

  “So what’s the upshot?”

  She put out her hand, replete with silver rings, and placed it over mine, saying: “Don’t be alarmed. I haven’t read it all yet. And Adnan has the final say. I believe he is interested in publishing you.”

  “So let’s drop the subject. Why don’t you tell me about yourself?”

  She raised her eyebrows. “There’s nothing to tell.”

  “Try.”

  “I lie a lot.”

  “No matter.”

  She turned her glass of arak around in her fingers. “I always wanted to be a writer,” she said. “I married for love. Other women were jealous of me over my husband. I have a six-year-old daughter. My work with Adnan is fulfilling: I got the job after a long struggle with his family, who wanted me in the role of a housewife . . . That’s everything.”

  I hadn’t taken my eyes off her rosy skin and her tender lips.

  “And you?” she asked me. “Are you married?”

  “I was,” I replied.

  “And now, of course, you have a girlfriend?”

  “My wife was my only girlfriend.”

  “Really?”

  I lit a cigarette. “I’d like it if you gathered your hair to the back.”

  She lifted her hands to her hair and gathered it in the back, then fastened it in a ponytail.

  She asked my permission to leave the table, and she was gone for several minutes. As soon as she got back, she said: “What do you think about us getting out of here?”

  “But the bottle isn’t empty yet,” I said.

  “I have to stop by the house for my daughter.”

  We left the restaurant and headed downtown. She turned on the radio and light Western music came out at us, but she fiddled with the dial, switching from clas
sical music to a news report and a program for children, before finally settling on a song by Farid al-Atrash.

  Farid al-Atrash’s lament continued to echo in my ears until we arrived at a place near the television building. She stopped the car in front of a luxury building with a wide entrance, made up of several levels of marble stairs.

  There were a number of security guards in civilian clothes, one of whom accompanied us to an elevator. Lamia took out a key from her purse and opened the elevator door. I got in behind her and stood watching the panel, in the middle of which was only one button.

  When the elevator stopped, I walked behind her, and my feet sank in layers of lush carpet. I found myself in a luxuriously furnished entrance room, and I followed her to a wide room whose walls were covered with ornate wood paneling.

  “One moment,” she said.

  She left me there.

  There was a wide sofa with a plush white exterior that stretched along the length of one wall, with an endless number of small pillows on it, each in varying shades of white and brown. In front of it were chairs of the same design and a low wooden table with a polished surface and a thick edge.

  Occupying the second wall were two large sliding glass panels, behind which another large room appeared. Around its walls were high-backed chairs, gilded and decorated with engravings in Arabic, as well as small tables with brass trays on them. Amid them stood a large mirror that almost touched the ceiling.

  As for the wall facing the sofa, it was occupied by three oil paintings in a contemporary style, and a wooden bookcase.

  I walked up to the bookcase and perused its books. There was a deluxe copy of the Qur’an, and several novels by Ihsan Abd al-Qaddous. Also a mass-market edition of Dr Spock’s book on child-rearing, and an English translation of a French novel called Angelique and the Sultan, in addition to several American magazines, and another French women’s magazine. I noticed what I at first imagined was a row of American mass-market books, but turned out to be videotapes that included the latest Egyptian melodramas. The video-tape player itself was on a separate shelf. A medium-sized photo of Adnan Sabbagh stood by itself in a gold frame on another shelf.

  I looked at his smiling face, then I headed for a chair with armrests beside the sofa, and sank into it. I started looking at one of the oil paintings made up of long parallel rows of small white squares surrounded by larger red squares. At a point in the middle of the painting, which wasn’t clear at first glance, the situation was reversed: the red squares were smaller and inside the white squares.

  A girl with plain features, wearing clean clothes and shoes, brought in a tea tray. The porcelain teapot was in a contemporary style with flowing lines and a wide handle coated in gold leaf. The sugar bowl consisted of a single piece of porcelain with a thin, barely visible line running across it, separating the bowl and its gilded cover.

  I poured a cup of tea for myself, and stirred it with a gold spoon. I was about to light a cigarette when Lamia came back, and sat on the sofa. She asked me to give her one.

  “Do you like my house?” she asked.

  “Very much,” I replied. “Even though I’ve only seen one small part of it.”

  “You’ll see the rest later,” she replied with a laugh.

  I poured her some tea and asked her about her daughter.

  “She went to her aunt’s house,” she said.

  She took a sip from her cup, then put it on the table and stood up, saying: “Come with me.”

  I followed her to the elevator.

  “Would you like to go for a swim?” she asked, as we went down to the ground floor.

  “In this cold weather?”

  She didn’t say anything. We got into the car. With a serious look on her face, she started driving.

  “Where to?” I asked her, after a little while.

  “I don’t know. Where do you want to go?”

  “Nowhere in particular.”

  We passed a billboard with an ad for a film by Roger Vadim, starring Sylvia Kristel. I had seen her in the film Emmanuelle, in which she played the role of a woman who enjoyed all kinds of sex.

  “I’ve seen her in person,” Lamia said.

  “I like her face a lot. Come on, we’ll go see her in it.”

  “If someone saw me in the movie theater with you, it would be a scandal. I’ll take you to your apartment.”

  I stayed silent until we reached the house, and then I asked her, “What do you think about a cup of coffee at my place?”

  “You mean at Wadia’s place?” she asked.

  “Wadia is in the mountains and won’t come back before this evening.”

  “Okay, bey,” she said, talking the way they do in Egyptian films.

  There was a free parking space directly in front of the building, wide enough for the car. But she maneuvered the vehicle several times to park it in a side alley some distance from the main street.

  I noticed the filthiness of the apartment and the mess that was spread everywhere as soon as we entered. I sat her down in the living room, then opened the balcony door. I began gathering up books, magazines and clothes scattered on chairs. Then I brought a bottle of cognac and two glasses. I set a glass in front of her, but she put her hand over it. She leaned over to me and said, “Coffee.”

  I poured myself a glass that I downed in one go, and went to the kitchen to make the coffee. I let it boil for some time, so it could acquire the bitterness that Syrians and Lebanese love. Then I carried it out with two cups on a round tray of colored plastic.

  As I was pouring her cup, she asked me, “How is the film coming along?”

  “How did you know?”

  “Beirut is a small city; there are no secrets here,” she explained.

  “We’ll be done in almost a week.”

  She smiled wickedly. “Antoinette is a good director,” she said.

  “She really is,” I said, sitting down opposite her.

  “I hope the film isn’t all about the heroic acts and sacrifices of the Palestinians.”

  “And what if it is?”

  She shrugged her shoulders. “Nothing,” she said. “It’s just that we’ve gotten tired of that kind of film. And they’re the reason for the ordeal we’re living through.”

  I bit my tongue. A moment later, I asked her: “Were you in Beirut during the heavy fighting at the start of the civil war?”

  “No,” she replied. “I was in London the whole time.”

  I began to feel a headache coming on, so I got up to look for an aspirin. I found one in my shoulder bag and swallowed it with a swig of cognac, then returned to my seat.

  I looked closely at her lips, and then suddenly told her, “I want to kiss you.”

  The words came out of my mouth thick with liquor. She fidgeted in her seat with a feigned display of embarrassment. So I moved over next to her on the couch, and took her in my arms.

  “The balcony,” she said.

  I got up and went to the balcony and closed the curtains over the balcony door. I went back to where I was sitting beside her, then turned my entire body toward her.

  She lifted her mouth to me, and I savored the touch of her soft lips. She moved her thigh and pressed it against me. Then she brushed against me gently with her knees between my legs. That made it possible for her to notice that I wasn’t hard.

  She gently extricated herself from me without drawing her knee away. I wanted to say something, so I opened my mouth. My tongue seemed to be moving with considerable difficulty.

  The day had been full of mistakes. I had started drinking early. Then I switched between different kinds of alcohol. And now I wanted to tell her something, but I called her by my ex-wife’s name.

  She drew back from me, her eyes widening and her face going pale. I tried to explain to her how the first letter of her name was the same as my wife’s, and that the alcohol had made my tongue heavy. But the attempt wore me out, so I remained silent.

  After a moment, she said, “It’s getting l
ate. I have to leave.”

  “Stay for a little longer,” I pleaded.

  “I can’t. Wadia might come. I have to go.”

  Inside, I was glad she was going, so I stood up. She picked up her purse and asked me where the bathroom was. I pointed her toward it.

  I stood waiting for her in the living room until she returned, having straightened her hair and clothes. I started walking her to the door. “You don’t have to do that,” she told me.

  I put my hand on her arm, and she came close to me. I kissed her on the lips, and in a voice that I tried to give the ring of truth to, I told her, “I don’t want you to go.”

  She pressed herself against me, and angled her thighs in such a way that she could touch me. But there was something there that hadn’t changed, so she drew back, saying: “I have to go.”

  She raised her hand to my face and touched my cheek with her fingers, then added, “You had a lot to drink today. Talk to me tomorrow.”

  “I will.”

  I opened the door and was about to press for the elevator, but she stopped me, saying that she preferred to take the stairs. She waved goodbye, whispering in English, “Bye-bye.”

  I waited until she disappeared, then I went inside and locked the door behind me.

  Chapter 14

  Antoinette returned my “Good morning” without taking her eyes off the scattered papers on her desk. When I sat down in front of her, I discovered that her eyelids were swollen, and that she had put on a good deal of eyeliner to conceal that fact. I sensed that she was extremely nervous.

  She headed toward the small kitchen next door, saying: “We’ll have some coffee, and then we’ll begin.”

  I picked up the newspapers off her desk, and cast a quick glance at their headlines. Attempts were still ongoing to rescue the Arab summit conference slated to be held next week in Amman. In Muscat, Sultan Qaboos had declared that the Soviet Union was responsible for the instability in the Gulf region, and he demanded that the nations of the West counteract the Soviets’ expansionist policy. In Khartoum, a US official was looking into Sudanese defense requirements. And in Washington Menachem Begin declared that his government would not relinquish Syria’s occupied Golan Heights. In Paris, Le Figaro said that Syria had become another Ethiopia in the heart of the Middle East, after ratifying a treaty of peace and cooperation with the Soviet Union.