Beirut Blues

by Hanan al-Shaykh

  Jawad closes his eyes, wanting to believe that things are as they were and that he’s merely gone deaf or has distorted vision. Images buried in the convolutions of his mind rise to the surface. The top floor of the building like an elephant lying on its side used to house an eye clinic. There his mother had shown him two photographs of his grandmother, displayed to encourage prospective patients, before and after an operation to her right eye. The operation had been the old lady’s first time in the city, and as she went to get into the elevator she had turned to her daughter crossly and said, “For goodness’ sake, what have you been giving me to eat if you need to bring me to scales like these to weigh me?”

  Paloma was the hairdresser’s where they put a wig on my mother’s head to encourage her to buy it. The smell of hair spray and the beer they used to make the hair lie flat and smooth as paper seems to linger in the air. The narrow lane is still there and the rooms overlooking it where I’d dreamed I was destined to end my days. A taxi had dropped me and Zemzem near here, between a repair garage and a bakery, close to the taxi stand. I clutched Zemzem’s hand as she protested loudly to the driver, who refused to go on to Sahat Al-Burj. “Lord, what a disaster!” she cried.

  Instructing me not to look to right or left, she wrapped her scarf around her face, almost covering her eyes, and shouted to me to hurry; as I ran I was looking about me to try to find out why she was afraid, but all I could see were the garage mechanics covered in oil from head to foot. “Why? What is this place?” I asked, smelling the newly baked bread.

  “A market where respectable people work.”

  I didn’t realize that she meant the opposite until I heard her telling my grandmother about it, trembling, raising her eyes imploringly to the ceiling: “Lord, I hope nobody saw me,” she moaned.

  “So what if they did? Asma was with you, wasn’t she? What’s all the fuss about?” my grandmother had replied scornfully.

  When I first thought about sex and love, instead of dreaming of a boy of my own age or a movie star, I began to have nightmares about being in a room in the red-light district and not daring to escape in case one of the men of the family killed me. The dream comes back to haunt me and makes me more frightened than ever of approaching Sahat Al-Burj from the direction of the market.

  Jawad must realize why I laughed yesterday when he suggested taking a taxi. These ruins are bound to be shocking: you need to be prepared and be with someone you know. They’re always shocking, however much you think you’re used to their barbarity.

  I remember when I was with Hayat a militiaman rising from behind a table in the emptiness and offering us a cup of coffee. Hayat hesitated, but I nodded my head gratefully. I was moved to be confronted by his kind, lonely eyes in the midst of this destruction; the tall plants all around created a somber, slightly eerie atmosphere and I asked him if he was scared at nights. He laughed and tapped his gun. “How could I be?”

  As we stood up to go he whispered in my ear that he was afraid of owls and there were dozens about. “And of crazy dogs,” he added, like someone concerned to be as honest as possible.

  To my surprise he asked if he could have a lock of my hair. As I was thinking that perhaps he hadn’t seen a woman for a long time or was on drugs, he took out a Swiss army knife with a tiny pair of scissors attached to it. I held out my hand to take it but he came close to me and cut off an end of my hair, then tore a piece off an old newspaper serving as a tablecloth under a dish and empty beer glass, wrapped the hair carefully in it, and put it away in his shirt pocket. I couldn’t erase the scene from my mind for days, and each time I brushed my hair I had visions of the lock of hair in the torn-off bit of newspaper hidden in his pocket, and thought of that vast high-ceilinged room open to the street where there was a fighter who was afraid of hooting owls.

  Now I am bored by these ruins, but I don’t want to force Jawad to leave, for it takes time to absorb it all. It’s impossible not to have vivid memories of the past here, and then the ruins spring to life, with the temporary return of the imported palm trees, hurrying pedestrians, blaring horns, and distinctive smells of coffee, grilled meat, garlic. I remember my first visit to the commercial district after a gap of several years. I woke up one day in Simon’s apartment and opened my eyes to see him picking his clothes up off the floor and pulling them on. He kissed me on the forehead and told me to wait for him in the hotel that afternoon. Simon was a press photographer who had a sad look in his green eyes, except when he was working. We had only dared to speak to one another the day before, but we’d been exchanging furtive glances for the previous week. Although I was hung over, I got up too and dressed hurriedly so that I could go with him to Sahat Al-Burj. Almost overnight this area had become a malign sickness affecting the collective mind. It had been the commercial heart of the city and now the roads had turned in on themselves and were known only as access and exit points. My breathless enthusiasm lasted until I saw a fig tree bearing a single fruit; it was bent double as if groaning with exhaustion, its broad spreading leaves silent and covered in dust. I felt it was looking at me sadly, without reproach, but I knew I was a traitor because I had shown no aversion to the war.

  From the roof of the Azariyya building I saw the buildings collapsing like dominoes. The ones that resisted seemed to be waiting their turn, observing the splendid collapse of those around them; it was as if they preserved within them the memory of the past in the color of their paint, the tiles, the electricity cables, and the billboards. An advertisement for a film surviving as a reminder of the city in the days when it used to swallow lights and spit them out like a fire-breathing dragon. The remains of a neon arrow pointing to Aazar coffee. The collapsing buildings like spotted leopards crashing to the ground. Strange colors for which people had no names, as they stood watching overwhelmed by the spectacle of the dismemberment of what had constituted everyday life. I found myself thinking of our house. Would it be like this one day? Then I rushed into the jaws of death with Simon and ate sandwiches with a group of snipers; a little end of the blue sea showed behind us, very blue. Simon wanted to make me understand that sniping was a military tactic, not a giant in the sky who regarded everything that moved on the ground as fair game.

  There were three of them. One was staring intently through a pair of binoculars searching for prey. He said to the others quietly, “See the clothesline. That woman pouring coffee. No. Next to the building with green windows. Yes, there.”

  “Yes, yes. I said from the start above the Pepsi-Cola sign.”

  “That’s right. The woman in a stripy dress.”

  Their sudden silence took me by surprise. I saw the gun recoil violently, then the man who had fired it laid it on the ground. “It was the woman in a blue dress,” he said.

  What I saw with Simon made me think about the war in a completely different way from those who didn’t leave their houses and derived their view of what was happening from the radio, newspapers, and the terror of the battles outside their windows. I hadn’t simply grown accustomed to the idea of war; life and death had become realities embedded before my eyes and in my throat, thanks to Simon. He was like two different people: one confident that he was protected from death by being in the thick of things, and the other suffering from a fear he couldn’t dislodge, a chronic condition which set in as soon as it got dark, making him feel as if he were in a sauna bathed alternately in hot and cold sweat. He lit large numbers of candles but they only increased his feelings of isolation. His imagination gave birth to specters and he felt that he was being watched. The moment he extinguished his candles his thoughts rushed in, confused and sick, and the night became an instrument of torture, bearing down on his chest with its leaden blackness so that he had difficulty breathing. He tried to shift this weight without success, for the air he breathed in the house was as heavy as if it were weighed down with tiny fragments of metal. Any moment now he was certain a bullet would lodge in his head, or flying shrapnel would burst through the walls and blow the place
apart. He went to bed, but couldn’t sleep; he wanted some affection. He wanted sex. He wanted to forget the violence. But even these sexual feelings couldn’t erase the entrenched fear which had become synonymous with his soul, and which only departed in the morning, when he got up and light was flooding the room, and his clothes and the furniture and everything around him looked familiar and reminded him of the orderly routine of life. Out in the street, he liked the familiar disc of the sun, first red then yellow, which penetrated the fibers of his anxiety with a brilliant warmth, making him forget the night even existed and giving him the spirit to start the day afresh. The reality of the war reestablished itself gradually, and he rushed from place to place, with his camera slung around his neck, recording his fear and deferring it till nighttime.

  Simon became the strength I drew on to carry me through my day, the news bulletin which, however unpleasant, was clear and activated my mind, bringing me closer to events. But Simon decided to leave. This didn’t concern me at first because he always said he was leaving. The first time we talked he told me how he decided to leave during the massacre of Karantina when he was certain he was going to be killed. In Karantina he had seen bodies piled up at street corners just like garbage. Bodies stacked in pyramids of assorted colors with irregular corners because of a random hand or foot or head sticking out awkwardly. When he realized who was guarding one of these lopsided pyramids, not allowing photographers anywhere near it, he was certain his luck was in. It was Abu’l-Zooz, the joiner who did work for his family and made all the wooden furniture they required. “I said to Abu’l-Zooz, ‘I want to take a photo,’ “ Simon told me. “He was delighted for me to see him in this important position.

  “ ‘Certainly. You can take everything except this,’ gesturing at the pile of corpses.

  “ ‘Fine. I wouldn’t want to anyway. No one would publish it,’ I answered indifferently, without looking at the human pyramid.

  “I started clicking away, and took a picture of him offering me a glass of champagne as he asked after my family. That picture was published in the world press, and even though my name didn’t appear on it, I was terrified of Abu’l-Zooz. Only when things had settled down did he go back to his old trade. My mother invited him to the house to make sure that he was well disposed towards me, filling up his plate each time he emptied it so he couldn’t say anything about me.”

  But Simon wept, determined to leave the western sector. He had discovered how misguided he’d been to think the fact he was a Christian wouldn’t stand in the way of him forming close relationships with the fighters, be they Palestinians, communists, Shiites, or Druzes. All along he had remained convinced his name and religion were matters of chance and had nothing to do with him personally. He wouldn’t even acknowledge that this could have been changed by the war. But on a day when the desire for revenge reached huge proportions following battles and kidnappings on both sides, he was taken captive at a checkpoint and learned that his name could be a matter of life and death.

  In the end he hadn’t been saved by the permits he carried nor by mentioning the names of important people in the resistance, since the militiaman holding him was impervious to reason and sense. All that saved him from certain death was the decision of the high-up official who came to inspect the hostages. Questioning Simon, he found he was wearing a bulletproof jacket and this convinced him he had tumbled on a foreign spy, not a press photographer, as the hostage claimed to be.

  I couldn’t help wondering, as Simon told me he had finally decided to go, how he would live away from the war, which had become his full-time job. His office was the trenches, the barricades, and the empty buildings. I felt then that I didn’t know him and hadn’t experienced the taste of his lips, the weight of his body on mine, although sometimes we had been content just to hold hands in the darkness, which was so powerful and so soft that it drowned out the sound of explosions. We derived warmth and tenderness from the sound of each other’s breathing, like two old people obliged to be together because they shared the same dentures. As I said good-bye to him I held him close, even though it was broad daylight in the hotel entrance lounge, promising to visit him in the eastern sector and stay with him for a few days every now and then. But as soon as I turned away from the hotel, Simon went right out of my mind; I thought about him from time to time when I wanted some affection, some physical contact, and crossed into the east as if I were walking a tightrope, swinging wildly between wanting to be with him and wishing I hadn’t come. Eventually the thread that had joined us wore away and we rarely met, because our city was divided in two.

  After the duty-free market with its beautiful stone walls, the ruins, and the jungle of monster plants, Jawad and I take a road which leads us by women with heads wrapped in black kerchiefs. One of them has a candle in her hand: I guess she must make regular visits to the remains of the church there.

  One day I had broken free from my father’s hand and gone into this little church. It smelled strongly of candles and incense and was lit by glowing chandeliers and the Virgin Mary’s face ringed with gold and silver halos behind protective glass. If you stuck a twenty-five-piastre piece on the glass, you knew that your prayers would be answered. I remember rushing outside to my father, who was buying vegetables, and pretending to be nauseous with hunger so that he would give me a quarter lira to stick on the magic glass in the church, then perhaps the glittering gold saint would exchange my father for a new one. But he wouldn’t give me a quarter lira and dragged me from one market to another and through a narrow archway into a little place, gloomy as a rat’s hole, which opened into another market smelling of roast meat; here we sat down with a lot of men at wooden tables. I heard one of them saying he could eat three camels. I asked my father if I had to eat a whole camel.

  My father used to have a shop close by which my uncle had been forced to sell when it became obvious the losses could never be recouped once my father had decided to work for God; he refused to make a profit of one single piastre on his fine-quality broadcloth, even though his brother and other members of the family took him to consult a man of religion, who urged him to return to buying and selling as before, limiting his profits in accordance with religious law. But my father renounced everything. He began selling off the Persian rugs in our house and my mother’s jewelry, unknown to her, then donated the money to mosques in Iraq, indifferent to her wails of protest: she had been proud that my father’s business was in the heart of a commercial area and well known to many people, and tried to make him do his duty again, threatening to leave him or devising ways to catch him out, but my father had moved into a world of his own, far removed from ordinary everyday life. He would have liked to be able to prohibit Isaf the maid and my mother from discussing mundane topics, so that they could spend their time and energy on praying. He stopped shaving his beard regularly, wore the same suit and pair of shoes every day, had his old red tarboosh repaired again, and even shaved his head for the sake of cleanliness and purity. His relatives gradually stopped visiting us, as all he talked about was repentance and Judgment Day. He advised one of them not to send his son to medical school, since God was the only true doctor, and said that instead he should go to Iraq to study Islamic jurisprudence and law. So it went on, until we found we had even stopped waiting for him at mealtimes. In fact, it was a burden to us when he did appear, and my mother started up a flurry of activity in the house whenever he began to pray, hoping he would go to the mosque.

  Jawad and I progress from the duty-free zone and Suq Sursuq to Al-Azariyya, where the smell of old books still seems to hang in the air. His father had apparently insisted on bringing him secondhand books, in particular from a bookshop here belonging to a relative’s family, and was never happy buying a new book, however cheap. Meanwhile, I am thinking of the Capitol Hotel and Omar Sharif. I tell Jawad about going to the hotel with thirteen-year-old Aida, who while on her way to take her father his lunch in the cloth market, had seen Omar Sharif going into the hotel. She caug
ht up with him inside and told him about his admirers in her school. He was amused by this bright little girl who offered him some of her father’s lunch. “You take care of your father’s lunch, my dear,” he said, “and we’ll see you again sometime.”

  Aida went back that same afternoon with three pretty girls from the top class and led them up to his room. He opened the door and looked embarrassed because he was wearing a hairnet to flatten out his crinkly hair.

  Jawad responds to the mood of these memories, but proceeds to tell me of experiences as remote from mine as they could be. His thoughts had always revolved around phrases he couldn’t get out of his mind, and feelings which pestered him to let them see themselves on paper. He wrote his first novel and hawked it around the publishing houses, who asked if he was prepared to pay the costs of having it published. As a result he stopped writing and put all his efforts into finding a way of leaving the country and going abroad, explaining to foreign consulates how vital it was for him to study in their countries, how much he longed to go abroad and experience a foreign culture, and describing his situation living in a house full of noise from morning till night.

  I sit with Jawad in a café overlooking the sea with the ruins behind us. We hear the waves gently lapping against the wooden foundations and they seem to say everything’s still the same. It’s as if I’ve never left this chair, as if I’m still sitting with a group of students and we form a simple network of thoughts and ambitions. Now I can erase from my mind the vision of myself naked in his arms, grateful to the circumstances which have prevented this idea becoming a reality. I find that doing this gives me a feeling of strength, which changes to happiness and makes me fly above the café table, at ease and restored to myself after a long separation. I study my fingers and the palm of my hand, which seem important again.