The Catastrophe

by Ian Wedde

  She had not wanted to argue with Abdul Yassou at this time, the time of their romance and marriage, but he saw her doubts and took care to soothe them. Was he not a businessman after all, he murmured, one who had to live by his own wits, since her family had decided to mistrust him? And was he not a businessman in Lebanon, where business was conducted in the old ways? And what, he whispered, caressing her, were they now to stage their own civil war, like the one that had ruined Beirut and his own father?

  Yes, she had known something, but not everything. Yes, he had come and gone without much explanation from Amman after her graduation and return there in 1983. He said it was because her family still did not welcome him without reservation in their house. Yes, his legitimate rage was on behalf of Boutros when she left the child with her maid and went to Beirut that year and was present when the US Embassy was bombed. What was she thinking? She did not even know the answer herself. And, yes, he had reasons for taking Boutros away to Paris when she again left him with the maid and went to Beirut in 1986. And who could blame him for being armed when her brothers came to Paris to recover the child he loved just as passionately as she did?

  And even then, in those difficult times, she was still living in that presentness.

  But was she so crazy then to want to take her work where it was needed? Was he to be punished for loving his own son and fearing the zeal of his crazy wife? These were not unreasonable questions, even to this day. And the years after she agreed to return to Paris with him in the spring of 1988, to complete her specialist pédiatrique at l’Hôpital Robert Debré, their enjoyment of excursions with Boutros in Buttes Chaumont and la Villette, the apartment they were comfortable in with her deferred dowry – were these the years not of her happiness but of her delusion? Were their special nights out at Le Baratin on rue Jouye-Rouve close to their apartment also a delusion? Was she incapable of seeing what her husband did?

  No, she was not. She was not incapable of seeing it. But there were limits to what she knew about him and what he did, and these were not limits she chose to impose on her knowledge. They existed, she saw them, she did not deny them, but she left them alone. And this was because she saw that there were no limits, no there were none, to what she knew about his love for Boutros. She spent her days at Robert Debré in the urgences pédiatriques looking into the faces of anxious love, she knew their expression. So perhaps she also chose to accept that whatever she did not know about her husband was overruled by that expression she saw on his face when his lips reached down to the cheek of their sleeping Boutros, by the terror she saw there on the face of a father, the hope that this child might always be safe.

  Every month they would get somewhat drunk at Le Baratin because it was congenial and Abdul Yassou liked the heavy Argentinian wine and the rich meat dishes, and afterwards they would dismiss the babysitter and make love – was she not justified to hope, on this evidence, that their happiness was permitted? And also, if she did not inquire too closely about the nature of his business trips, was that not least because of the rigours of her medical studies and her duties as a young mother?

  It was twenty-one years after she had first shivered in anticipation at the sight of Abdul Yassou’s fine teeth biting the thick Argentinian beefsteak at Le Baratin that Philippe put the dossier of Abdul Yassou on the table in front of her in the house in Amman. It was true, she did not deny it then or now, that time in her life with Abdul Yassou and Le Baratin had been a burden for many years, she had not escaped it. Philippe put the dossier on the table in Amman in the house that had been her father’s, where she now lived when she was there, on Jebel Ashrafieh near the Orthodox church. She opened the dossier on the same old table where her grandmother had yearly required her father to place the deed box for the house in Lydda, the same table at which they had then eaten the yearly ‘catastrophe’ lunches. It was the same table across which the young Abdul Yassou had carefully regarded her from beneath his beautiful eyelashes, thirty-four years ago, when she was just a schoolgirl of sixteen and he a man of twenty-six.

  And now nineteen years since Abdul Yassou had descended into something resembling a well poisoned with corpses when the only real love of his life died. When Boutros, their beautiful son, whose warm cheek his lips had touched with a father’s fearful love, died.

  This was her obsessive litany, the enumeration of her fate, the dates she counted again and again as if with a rosary.

  But now, perhaps, this is the only place from which I can go forward. Yes, but Abdul Yassou could not – not now, certainly, but neither from the moment nineteen years ago when his beloved Boutros died.

  And could she, now? Go forward? But where?

  She even smiled at the wet bite-mark and the dark lipstick on the pillow with which she had smothered her groans. In another circumstance it might be mistaken for a lover’s signature. Indeed, perhaps it was, in a sense. As the poet Mahmoud Darwish wrote, ‘Place my pillow on the wound.’

  She even remembered the poet’s face when he read those lines in the hall near Place de la République, his large tinted spectacles and mournful mouth, and the voice that was more sad than angry. The audience leaned forward in their seats and there was a murmuring throughout, as if many of those present were also repeating the words they heard inside themselves, connecting the words to where rough thyme grew in Galilee, at Birwa, near Acre, the poet’s birthplace. Some of those in the audience would have trodden on that thyme, and forty years later smelled the words the poet recited in Paris – and others, like herself, smelled the place only in the poet’s words, or in the words of her grandmother when she recited her account of the small garden in Lydda.

  And when she spoke to the poet about this, he said that yes, there were two exiles, one from the place and another from the memory of it, and his poems were always losing their way between the two; that was their meaning.

  She did her best to clean her face and refresh her body using bottled mineral water and a towel, not wishing to reveal her condition on the way to the bathroom where the food writer had performed so ostentatiously. Perhaps Philippe had by now returned to the room downstairs to wait for her, or perhaps he was still waiting out there on the landing. She did not want him to see on her face the stain of her grief, as she had often seen it on the faces of mothers and fathers, when she was a young doctor who would sometimes go and sit alone in Nôtre Dame de Fatima near the urgences pédiatriques, to compose herself.

  She brushed her teeth with the mineral water, and spat into a cup, then applied fresh makeup and some perfume. That would have to do, though soon she would stand under a hot shower in the service apartment in Geneva, for as long as she wanted, and put on fresh clothes. And cease to conceal herself within the identity of the singer Maya Yazbeck, for the love of God.

  Now Philippe had to listen to her. She would make him, because this was the moment at which events would inevitably move forward, this was the only place from which I can go forward, and he had agreed that she had the right to propose a direction, to make her choice before the arrival of Antun in the morning, which was now already not so far away.

  When she came into the room downstairs, Philippe was there sitting at the table and smoking a cigarette. He extinguished it when he heard her come in, as was his polite manner, but he did not look at her until she had sat down opposite him. And even then, he did not alter his disposition or move his head but merely caught her eyes with his, as if he had been gazing all along at the exact space where her face would appear. There was no expression on his face and, having stubbed out the cigarette, he folded that hand over the other and looked at her as if she had been there all along. She had brought in a bottle of arrack and another of water, with two rinsed glasses, but Philippe did not change his expression when she poured two drinks and put one in front of him. He inclined his head just a little in thanks, but did not lift the glass to his lips.

  Outside, the sanitaire went past slowly and she waited until the sound of the truck’s engine and its rus
hing water had passed – yes, the night was almost over. How often as a young mother and a weary young student doctor in Paris she had risen at the sound of the sanitaire to study for an hour or two before Boutros woke and needed his breakfast.

  Then the truck turned the corner of the street and the silence in the room seemed to emanate from Philippe, from his patience, but also perhaps his menace. She took a swallow of the cloudy aniseed and began to sing directly into Philippe’s silence, the well-known song of Oum Kalthoum, ‘Alf Layla Wa Layla’, some short verses from it which he surely knew. Everybody knew that song.

  You took me in love in the blink of an eye

  and you showed me where the sweetest days are

  the sweetest days, the sweetest days

  and the desert of my life became a garden

  My love, let us live in the night’s eyes

  and tell the sun come over, come after one year not before,

  come over, come over, come over, come over,

  after one year but not before

  In a sweet night of love

  in one thousand and one nights

  one thousand and one

  one thousand and one nights

  in one thousand and one nights

  one thousand and one

  one thousand and one nights

  They say it is life

  what is life but a night like tonight

  like tonight, tonight, like tonight

  The tears that ran down her cheeks caught in the corners of her mouth, and she did not restrain them. As she sang the last lines, her mouth was salted and moistened by the tears which also dripped from her chin on to the table in front of her. Water was running from her nose, and she let it. It was that heavy, burdensome present of so many years that now seemed to leave her, to rush out of her, as Boutros had left her body, and then the afterbirth, all at once a freedom from effort she could never have imagined.

  Then Philippe lifted his glass of arrack and took a sip, but still his expression remained a kind of silence. In front of him, Hawwa Habash wept without restraint as she had never imagined she could except at the death of her little habibi, her beloved Boutros, the beloved also of Abdul Yassou.

  She waited, inside the silent gaze of Philippe, until she could speak again.

  ‘I have been the fate of Abdul Yassou who was my husband, and before that I was the destiny of our child, as God knows, and now you are asking me to take the fate of this food writer upstairs in my hands also?’

  Philippe did not answer her, so she continued. ‘I will tell you what this man said to me, this fool as we all believe him to be, this problem. To me, when he saw what fate might propose for him, when I had explained it, he said, this is the present. This is the only place from which I can go forward. This was not a complicated thought, but for him a profound one. What I saw in him was what I have seen many times in the faces of those looking at their own decisions to live or die, or how to live or die, or when.’

  She thought Philippe was about to interrupt her at this moment so she raised her finger to her lips to stop him – but he simply took another sip of his arrack and waited.

  ‘There is a certain moment when the doctor must depart and leave the decision with the person who owns it. There is for all of us fortunate to have become adults a place of balance where our life tips this way or that. For Abdul Yassou, the shaduf tipped the day our son Boutros was killed.’

  Now Philippe lifted his hand as if to say ‘Stop’, but she reached across and pressed his hand back on the table.

  ‘Now, Philippe, you have to let me speak until I have finished.’

  He placed his other hand on top of the one with which she had restrained his interruption. She felt its warmth, but there was little enough warmth in his face.

  ‘Yes, that day he blamed me, and not without reason; he beat me and broke my arm, he held his gun to my head, his face was black. That was his present, Philippe, you must know this, there was no other, this present was always with him after that, so how could he go forward? Yes, he was already for a long time a crook and a collector of bribes and rashwa, no better or worse perhaps than all those who profited from that war in Lebanon, from the great zaim down to those mokhtar who issued passports from their barber shops. But what he became after that day was worse, as you know, and the bad got worse. He could not stop it, and so it had to be stopped. That was not a decision he could make.’

  Opposite her, Philippe made a rocking motion with one forearm braced against the other. ‘Yes, sister,’ he murmured, ‘what will the shaduf lift from the well?’

  Then he smiled, just a little, and made a joke. ‘Not, at any rate, the voice of Oum Kalthoum, in your case. Nor, thank God, that of Maya Yazbeck.’

  She thought he must be mocking her archaic figure of speech in the shaduf, and certainly he was mocking her singing, but how else could she speak of something at once so old and so familiar? The old lever that lifted water from a well was how she visualised that moment when fate and decision met across the fulcrum. And how many songs had been sung and were still composed every day in which the sun was begged to slow its passage so the night of love might go on, go on, go on – that the present might stop still? Her own decisions had tipped her fate, and then she had moved on only because she was blessed with work and the thanks for it that appeased her guilt and grief. But what had Abdul Yassou had? A heart that was poisoned, from which his rage could never drain away.

  Now Philippe stood up wearily; he was after all a man of seventy who had sustained his command of their project for many weeks now, on insufficient sleep. This time it was his turn to stop her from speaking. He placed his finger on his lips, which were almost smiling, again as if gently mocking her. ‘A moment,’ he said. ‘One moment, Oum Boutros.’ Then she knew with certainty that he was not mocking, and her heart gave a sad thump in her chest – she could feel this long night approaching its conclusion.

  When he came back it was with a towel, a napkin, and a bowl of warm water scented with eau de cologne. He made her turn her chair so he could carefully bathe her face. She could smell his cigarettes, and that he, too, had not changed his clothes since that morning. He gently cleaned her face as he might the hot, tear-stained face of a granddaughter. She closed her eyes while he did so, and then felt his kiss on her forehead, and the towel he folded across her hands. As she dried her face and hid her emotion a little longer inside the towel, she heard his chair scrape back on the other side of the table. And then his voice, quiet as usual, factual, without emotion, the voice of an engineer or perhaps a surgeon, calmly listing the necessities of the moment.

  ‘To remind you, my friend, because you need to believe the truth, that what you have done is just. That man you were brave enough to shoot, risking your own life and your future, was no longer your husband – and I would say he was also no longer the father of your son. You may not agree with me, but listen. You say there is a moment when the thing tips, whatever it is, like a shaduf at the well. We call it fate when we do not wish to make the decision ourselves. But I would say that Abdul Yassou decided he was no longer the father of Boutros when he sold arms to both the Kataeb who are the enemies of Palestine, and to their enemies the fedayeen, his own people. And when he stole medical supplies from the Red Crescent at Barbir hospital in Beirut and then sold them back, when he imported spoiled food and sold it to the starving, when he accepted rashwa and kickbacks to launder the money of those zaim resident in Paris, and kept accounts in those other places where, as you know, he also kept women. And this was even in the year he married you, which was also the year your son was conceived. No, you did not know about these things, or not enough, but you know now that what he did after both the birth and the death of his son, whom of course he loved, was worse only in that it continued, not in degree.’

  She removed the towel and saw then that, despite his calm voice, Philippe’s face had become blotchy with rage, that his nose was white with it, and there was sweat glistening on his
forehead.

  ‘I would say, my poor friend, that the man you married was not the father of your child even before the child was conceived. And that this was his decision, despite his paternal gestures, his protestations, despite what you perceive to be his fate.’

  He spat the last word, venomously, with rage, as though all the calmness in his voice had been preparing to detonate and now shot fate out, hissing like an artillery round. He reached across the table and took the towel from her.

  ‘Excuse me,’ he said, and mopped his face and neck. Then, as he never did in her company, he lit a cigarette, his hands shaking. ‘And then, subsequently,’ he said, ‘as you know, the kidney harvests, those Syrian Jews in New Jersey, and even children, Palestinian ones ...’

  His careful factual voice had become disordered; he heard this and stopped. He waved the cigarette in apology and then stubbed it out. He took a large sip of his arrack. Calm blood began to return to his face.

  This, too, had been a tipping moment.

  She was not surprised by what he had said – she had even expected it, after the many days of his self-control, as their project came to its conclusion. Often she too had had to control her rage at the obscenity of the word ‘harvest’, as a doctor whose work was with poor children, and as the mother of a dead child. And now there was a different rapprochement in her relationship with Philippe, since he had finally showed her his emotion, which she had always known was what made him dangerous, not just his skill.