Farewell, Damascus

by Ghada Samman

  When she fired the shot, the revolver kicked back in her hand. She tightened her grip on it, afraid that it might strike her in the face. Her hand was so sore afterwards that she found it hard to drive or write for days on end. How could Rajih put a gun in my hand just like that without telling me what to expect? Lebanese people’s relationship with weapons scares me. And it scares me to think how easily I got a gun… I can’t wait to give it back!

  * * *

  When Dr. Manahili and Zain met for lunch at Faysal’s, he told her, “I came from Damascus just to see you.” And she believed him.

  “You look bright,” he added, “and pretty happy!”

  “Well,” she replied, “if it weren’t for the fact that I can’t visit Damascus, I could say I was completely happy. I’m working on my second short story collection, and I’m also a teacher and a journalist!”

  Their conversation was interrupted by a politician who came over from another table to greet Zain, and by an author who presented her with an invitation to attend a lecture he’d be giving at a local symposium.

  “I’ve got two pieces of news,” Dr. Manahili told her after their visitors had departed. “One’s happy, and the other’s sad. Which one should I start with?”

  “With the happy one, of course,” she said.

  “My wife is pregnant.”

  Squealing with excitement, Zain jumped spontaneously out of her chair and planted a kiss on his cheek in plain view of everyone in the restaurant.

  “You’re still your old self, Zain!” he said with a chuckle.

  “And now for the sad news,” she said. “What’s up?”

  “Well,” he said, “Lieutenant Nahi’s little boy died.”

  “Oh no! How?”

  “Of a fever. The antibiotic his ex-wife had bought for him from a local pharmacy turned out to be no good. She tried to contact Nahi about it but he wouldn’t talk to her. Once I was with him when she tried to phone him and he refused to take the call. In any case, the antibiotic she’d given their little boy was one of the expired medications Nahi and his partner had forged the dates on so they could get rich off other people’s backs.”

  “Oh, my God. I wonder if she’s heard about the medicine scandal.”

  “He murdered his own son.”

  “I feel terrible for the little boy and his mother! But it looks like Lieutenant Nahi’s gotten a taste of his own medicine now.”

  After a pause, Zain went on, “So has he learned to show people a little more compassion now that he knows what it feels like to suffer?”

  “I’m afraid not. In fact, he’s meaner than ever now. He had a friend of his thrown in jail on false charges just for having the nerve to beat him at a game of chess!”

  Just then a waiter came up and said to Zain, “You have a call from a journalist by the name of Mr. Asaad.”

  Zain got up and followed the waiter to the telephone. “Hello,” she began. “How are you, Mr. Asaad?”

  Dispensing with the usual niceties, he asked, “Have you read the newspaper?”

  “No, not yet,” she said. “What is it?”

  “They’ve arrested three saboteurs belonging to the Syrian secret police, and they’ve confessed that one of the things they were sent to do was to kidnap you and take you back to Syria!”

  Wobbly kneed, Zain made her way back to the table and told Dr. Manahili what she’d learned from Mr. Asaad.

  “I’d heard about it, actually,” Dr. Manahili confessed, “but I didn’t want to worry you. I could tell you didn’t know about it yet. Nahi’s furious that you managed to leave Syria, and he’s out to get you. Fortunately, he doesn’t know that my ‘cousin’ was you!”

  “But why would he send a network of saboteurs to Beirut when he knows full well that it’s the only safe haven he’ll have himself once he’s deposed from his throne? God help us from people like him.”

  * * *

  Zain was sitting with Marlene one day at the Diplomat Café when they were approached by none other than the poet Alwan, clad in his usual prehistoric sandals and his tattered shirt. Zain jumped up to welcome him and introduce him to Marlene. Marlene told him she’d read most of his poems and that she was a fan of his.

  Zain sensed special vibes between Marlene and Alwan of the sort she knew well.

  “Are you just here on a short visit, Alwan?” Zain asked. “And how’s the radio station?”

  Turning to Marlene, Zain added, “Comrade Alwan isn’t just a fantastic poet. He’s a mainstay of the Syrian Radio Broadcast.”

  Correcting her, Alwan said, “I’m not a mainstay of anything anymore. I’ve been on the outs with Nahi ever since our tussle that night, and like you, I had to get out of Syria. He denied everything, of course, and accused me of trying to trump up charges against him. So it looks like I’ll be a permanent guest around here.”

  “You’re welcome to stay for as long as you like,” Marlene said cheerfully. “I think the newspaper I work for has a job opening. We recently lost our literary editor, who’d been in exile and who recently went back to his home country to serve as Minister of Culture after the regime there was overthrown.”

  Chapter Seven

  Beirut simmered like a hot brew of clashing ideas. But instead of feeling lost and alone, Zain loved the place. She had found her intellectual home. Nor did she see herself as a fugitive or a refugee, but as a citizen in her own country. Oddly, the Lebanese had a way of being more welcoming to people from elsewhere than they were to each other!

  There were arguments, of course, over who was the true patriot—the Arab nationalist? The unionist? The isolationist? But the only weapon anybody pulled on his interlocutor was a pen. Accusations would fly, but with a kind of reserve, and via a kind of polite subterfuge. Whenever people met, they exchanged kisses on the cheek, and they were known for doing pendulum swings between the poles of intellectual attraction and its countless, moody variations!

  Zain viewed everything with a neutral eye. After all, she had come from a city with a completely different climate, where falsely accusing somebody of being a foreign agent was enough to get the accused locked up and murdered. In Beirut, by contrast, the same accusation would be grounds for nothing more than a pointed debate. There were people who tried to get her to take a stance on issues, but if she had, it wouldn’t have made her a candidate for being framed on charges of treason and ending up on the gallows or in prison for life. It would just have led to a heated discussion over a cup of coffee and an attempt to change her mind.

  Beirut was a city devoted to intellectual growth and exchange, not to burying people alive. It was a place where people were vibrant with thought, literature, and dialogue from whatever platform was available, be it a magazine, a journal, a newspaper, or a radio station, and where everyone’s competing ideas were bared for all to see. It was a place that had captured Zain’s heart. One scene reflective of this lively, liberated climate was especially dear to her heart. One day as she sat in the Dolce Vita, she saw a former Arab ruler, now deposed and in exile, sitting at a table with the remnants of his following. And at a neighboring table she spied an enemy of his whose own exile to Beirut (and what a lovely place to be exiled to!) had been caused by that same ruler. Seeing this kind of thing thrilled her heart.

  She never turned down an invitation from any party to a debate. She wanted to know, to be informed. She wanted to probe the depths of human nature, then slip out with girlfriends to Café Azar for a cup of Turkish coffee scented with rosewater the way she used to do in Damascus.

  As Zain and Marlene sat together at the barny Café Azar, which was located in a major office building, Marlene said, “How would you like to visit the Muharririn newspaper office and meet some of the folks there? It’s housed right here in this building. Then I could take you to the bookstore in the Capital Building. This neighborhood’s full of publishing houses and newspapers. The Dhaw’ newspaper and the publishing house where you and I met for the first time are both in the El Khandak El Ghamik
neighborhood not far from here.”

  “That’d be nice,” Zain said, hesitating. “But actually, I need to study this afternoon, so I think I’ll just head to the library.”

  While she was at the café, a number of editors came up to greet Zain, who had rarely received such acclaim for her work back in her home town. In Damascus I was surrounded by the canes and whips of suspicion, hostility and prejudice for being a member of the bourgeoisie. Certain people in power in my home country hated me for being a renegade against their doctrines. So they tried to put me in my place, exploiting my being a woman— and divorced—to hurt me double-time. But I even had enemies in the class I supposedly belonged to, like the religious clerics who hated me so much they issued legal rulings saying it was permissible to kill me. And back in Ziqaq Al Yasmin I was a “corrupting influence” because I’d defected from the conservative, rightest class I came from. So I was damned if I did, damned if I didn’t! As these thoughts were running through Zain’s mind, she looked up and who should she see but Ghazwan! He was talking to a waiter behind a counter and ordering an espresso to go.

  “That’s Ghazwan Ayed,” Marlene whispered. “You may have heard of him. He works at the newspaper on the third floor.”

  As she glanced again in Ghazwan’s direction, she saw him staring back at her in disbelief. He looked like somebody who had just come across a rare bird he’d been looking for forever in the forests of the night. He came up to their table. Then, ignoring Marlene, he said in a voice charged with earnest emotion, “You’re the Subki Park girl, aren’t you? You’re the girl I proposed to but who turned me down.”

  Zain nodded in affirmation.

  Marlene, bewildered at the serious, romantic turn the conversation had just taken between an editor-in-chief who’d held his post for exactly one week and an author he was supposedly meeting for the first time, sat there without saying a word.

  Transported suddenly out of space and time, Zain and Ghazwan forgot where they were and what day it was. They forgot Marlene. Each of them stood there staring at the other like somebody he or she had lost in an earthquake and had never expected to see again. Wanting nothing but to be alone with her, far from prying eyes, he invited her to lunch. Then, acknowledging Marlene’s presence at last, he said to her with the light wit that seemed to follow him wherever he went, “You, my dear, aren’t invited. See you!”

  Then, taking Zain by the hand, he pulled her toward the exit. When the lift was slow to reach their floor, he pulled her onto the stairs.

  As they ran down the stairwell like a couple of kids, he said, “I’m not going to let you get away from me again!”

  His car was half vintage, half rattletrap. But as she got in, Zain felt as though she were boarding a spaceship about to take off for the moon.

  “Where to?” he asked as he pulled out of the basement parking lot.

  Feeling relieved to be above ground—ever since the incident in Jeannie’s building, as it had come to be referred to, she’d hated underground parking garages, which made her feel she was about to suffocate—she said without hesitation, “To the sea… the sea.”

  Then suddenly, looking at her with his honey-sweet eyes, he said sadly, “I asked you to marry me and you turned me down. I asked you even before I knew your name or anything about you. From the first time I saw you, I knew you were my woman, my one true love on this planet.”

  Zain heard herself say calmly, “Turn left here to get out of this traffic jam. Then head for the sea.”

  “All the places I’ve found you—Subki Park, the Havana Café, Ziqaq Al Jinn—you’ve run away from my madness instead of being infected with it. Your madness is the studied kind. You’ve got it walled in. But I’ve gotten to know some facets of it through your stories, and they’re all linked by an invisible thread of caution. Nothing shakes you or diverts you from the path of cold logic. You’ve got an incredible mind, but you haven’t mastered the art of vertigo.”

  It started to rain inside her. If only that really were true! Her silent weeping closed her off from everything Ghazwan was saying. Then it went and stuffed its sorrows into the recesses of her heart the way an addict stuffs bottles of booze into his coat pockets. She felt the need to run away. I’m not going to fall in love again, damn it. I can’t take another disappointment. My divorce should have inoculated me against love’s scourge. She had paid dearly for her freedom. She had suffered in silence at first, secretly grieving her degradation and humiliation until, at last, she’d rebelled. And once she’d started rebelling, she hadn’t stopped.

  She thought back on how she used to stand sobbing on the back balcony off the kitchen, and how her elderly neighbor Mrs. Kotalli would try to console her. For all I know, she was more miserable than I was! As depressed, disillusioned and lost as I felt back then, I always knew deep down that poor Mrs. Kotalli was more lost than I was. Otherwise, she wouldn’t have been standing outside on a dark balcony herself!

  Ghazwan reached out and took her hand in his. She drew it away, resisting the urge to come out from behind her shield and bare her sorrows to him. Besides, he had sorrows of his own. So the only way to survive was to stay on her own. She’d once thrown herself into love’s quagmire, and if she hadn’t rescued herself at the last minute, she would have been pulled under by the quicksand. I’m never jumping into love’s bog again. I’m not letting it take me down. I swore never to let love debase me again, and I don’t want to forget that.

  Ghazwan took her to the Pigeon’s Grotto, a cliff-side café that overlooks Raouché Boulder. Looking down at the arched tunnel that runs through the rock’s base, Zain thought back on a recent adventure. When I first came here I started learning to water ski at the Long Beach swimming pool complex. Just yesterday I tried skiing under that stone archway, and the slightest mistake would have dashed me against the rocks. But I made it—I won the challenge—and I was high as a kite. My whole life has been a gamble, actually. But I blame myself now for not contacting Ghazwan earlier. Why didn’t I look him up as soon as I got here? I knew where he was, and what a brilliant writer he is, impassioned for Palestine.

  After making short shrift of the waiter by ordering for both of them without consulting her, Ghazwan said half-apologetically, “You’re thin. I know you prefer lean meat and lots of vegetables and tabbouli! But I also ordered you a big glass of fire water. I want you to get drunk if possible. When I saw you in Subki Park, there was some secret you were hiding. Then you escaped out the back door of the Kaddura Pharmacy. At the time I didn’t know anything about you, not even your name. I remember asking you to marry me, and I meant it.”

  …

  “Then you disappeared. I’d see pictures in the newspapers of a young woman who looked a lot like you. She was a story writer and had published a book in Beirut. I wanted to believe she was the Subki Park girl, that girl who’d been hurting and scared and broken-hearted, but holding herself together. As wounded as she was, she was determined to make it. Or at least, that’s how it seemed to me when I put my coat around her shoulders to keep her warm. After that I named her the blasé Havana Café girl, then the defiant Ziqaq Al Jinn girl who also ran away from me. I think that’s when I really got attached to her. And now I know she was you, after all.”

  …

  “Actually, I think I got attached to you from the moment I first saw you. Love at first sight is real. I know that now, because it’s happened to me, even though I reject it on the level of plain logic. I tried to explain my attraction to you by telling myself that since you were so crushed, so in pain, so defeated for some reason unknown to me but so determined to go on, you must have represented ‘the act of resistance’ for me. In other words, I’d fallen in love with your spirit.”

  After a pause, he added with his accustomed drollness, “I’ve got nothing against your body, of course. In fact, I’m all for it!”

  They both burst out laughing.

  They ate as if they’d never eaten before, and drank as though they’d never drunk b
efore. (In Zain’s case, of course, she really hadn’t drunk before!)

  As they left the Pigeon’s Grotto, Ghazwan announced that he’d be taking her for tea to a seaside café in Jounieh. Once there, Ghazwan ordered the tea, which was duly served by the waiter. Then, as if on a whim, he jumped up and pulled Zain out of her seat. Taking her by the hand, he led her back out of the café as if he were under the spell of beautiful lights emanating from an enchanted cloud. Hand in hand, they headed for the sea, leaving their papers in the café next to their untouched tea.

  We sat there in the sand as time committed suicide and the world’s clocks went into a collective swoon. Trancelike, we answered the call of the sun as it danced with its beloved the sea, shimmying gracefully in the garb of multihued clouds. We went strolling hand in hand over a rainbow toward the sun, hoping it would never meet the horizon. The atmosphere charged with bliss, we wanted to stop time at that magical moment. We didn’t notice that we’d waded out to sea until the salty waves were nearly up to our necks.

  With a timid laugh Ghazwan confessed, “I’m not a very good swimmer. How about you?”

  “I’m not bad myself,” she replied, “but if you start to go under, don’t count on me to save you!”

  They giggled like a couple of kids. By the time they headed back to shore, they were drenched to the bone. When they walked back into the café, the other patrons were laughing. They’d been watching them from the balcony. As they took their seats with the aplomb of someone who has no idea he’s dripping wet, someone sitting nearby started clapping. Then the rest of his table joined in. By this time everybody was in stitches, as though Ghazwan and Zain had done what they’d wished they could do but would never have dared to. It was one of those sweet moments that escape time’s grasp.