Beirut Blues

by Hanan al-Shaykh

  As soon as we get up to go, the destruction is there in front of us again in spite of the sea, the sky, the sun, the leaves on the trees, the distant birds. We are uneasy too far from the sight of the war and its trail of refuse. Even the groups of soldiers, whether they are Syrian or Lebanese, arouse vague feelings of affection.

  Everyone says “the eastern sector” and “the western sector” and your divisions have become a fact of life.

  The eastern sector and the western sector. The old names have faded in importance, names that seemed to have been there for all time: Jounieh, Jbeil, Al-Dawrah. New names have become prominent: Tariq al-Franciscan, Sudeco, the Museum with its mud and water, the smell of urine, and the people crossing from one sector to another with sorrow in their faces, a heavy weight on their shoulders, and the sense of frustration which escalates if this route is suddenly closed. People are always uncertain whether to choose the Sudeco route, where there is sniping, or the route by the Museum, which is more difficult and requires advance planning.

  Jawad is studying the roads again, no doubt trying to recognize them. His silence, punctuated by deep sighs, speaks clearly to me, his thoughts burn straight into my mind and interfere with my memories. As I look towards Sharia Muhammad al-Hout he shouts, “That’s the racecourse! Would you believe it? The main entrance of the racecourse!”

  The black iron gates have split right through and are covered in spots of rust like leprous scabs infecting even the gold whorls adorning the top of them. At Jawad’s insistence we go into the racecourse. People are dipping through a hole in the wall as if escaping into a green oasis between the trees. Despite the strong smell of urine, they pour through in their tens and hundreds, walking silently. They must be calculating to themselves the risks, hoping to reach the other sector without hearing a shot, and so they move as if they are on an urgent mission.

  Jawad is thinking, “If they allow people to cross here, why don’t they allow them to cross anywhere?”

  I’m thinking, “I’m sure these people are wondering if they’ll find anyone to give them a lift when they reach the eastern sector.”

  Jawad says aloud, “They are rushing through a bare landscape, between two sections of a city. Where are they going? Are they escaping from an ogre or congratulating themselves on winning their own personal Battle of Hittin? Or are they thirsty tribesmen who know where there’s another oasis with plenty of grass and water?”

  I laugh at Jawad’s comparisons, although I’m irritated at the way he continues to look at everything as if he is turning it into a work of literature.

  Some people are going to their jobs in the other sector carrying their papers and food. An elegantly dressed woman bends down and puts on a pair of plastic overshoes. She must have got them from Europe. Two girls strut along unconcerned, in high heels that plunge deep into the mud, on their way to keep a date. One puts a bit more lipstick on and the other rearranges her hair.

  Jawad used to go to the racecourse with his family and play in the big gardens. There was nothing to equal the smell of the racecourse gardens: pine, chamomile, wild rose. He remembers Ruhiyya lighting a fire of pine twigs when he had whooping cough and making him inhale the smoke.

  I have to strain to see the top of Sharia Muhammad al-Hout, where I was born. It branches off Sharia al-Sabaq, where we are now. I look at it, and at Sharia Hiroshima, and see an image of myself walking along the sidewalk where the restaurant was, following my father. I see my mother wearing a hairband like a twenties hat, right back off her forehead. I see her laughing eyes. She gasps and says to my uncle, “Did the fortune-teller really say that?” My uncle is reading her the biography of the singer Asmahan. “You were born in water, and in water you will die.”

  I can see my mother but not myself. For I am Asmahan and Asma. I see my mother, the beautiful child-woman, who suddenly turned and saw me there in her life. I call “Mama” and she remembers I’m not the singer Asmahan as a child, but her own daughter and what’s more, the daughter of a man whom she doesn’t want to recognize as her husband, because he doesn’t look a bit like her favorite stars, croon the latest songs, flirt, or even belong to the same epoch as her.

  So when he lay motionless and Isaf’s scream reverberated through the house, my mother, assuming he was dead, rushed around burning everything which reminded her of him so she could return to the present. Asmahan. My own voice is calling now. Asmahan. Asma. I see myself in the street where a car is revving its engine ready to try to cut across into the eastern sector. Nowadays the street looks like part of a film set, with its façades built of cheap wood and stone and most of the shop signs removed or worn away. I can hardly make out the bakery, the Banana Bar, and the dry cleaner’s. My father’s building is occupied by squatters, except for our apartment, where I used to position myself before the hallstand, hands on its cool marble, gaze into the mirror, and repeat, “I am Nadine, daughter of the famous actress.”

  I stood on the opposite sidewalk watching my father search intently through a pile of garbage, then make his way to the restaurant. I bought a chocolate bar and stood sucking it slowly to make it last. I heard someone in the restaurant calling to my father, “Hello there, Haj Mustafa.”

  I bought another bar and stood sucking it until my father came out of the restaurant, but I didn’t run after him and plead with him as my mother had instructed me to. I said over and over to myself, “Who are you? I don’t know you.”

  A woman and her daughter were looking at me, whispering together, making up their minds to talk to me. They must know I’m the daughter of that man clutching the rags he found in the rubbish. I had my answer ready in a flash. The haj is a neighbor of ours. His wife sent me to fetch him back home. And if he called me baba as if I was his daughter, I’d wink at them and say he calls everyone baba.

  So the girl’s question took me completely by surprise. “We were saying you look just like that actress. You could be her sister.”

  “I’m her daughter,” I answered immediately, with complete conviction.

  The girl’s face beamed with joy. “See. It’s true. I told Mama: the resemblance is uncanny.”

  “Do you live around here?” interrupted her mother in amazement.

  I knew at once what she was thinking: stars and media people don’t live in this part of town. “Me? No. In Hamra,” I answered confidently, in an accent which surprised even me. “I come here for private Arabic lessons.” And I gestured to a building on the corner of the street.

  We stroll around the racetrack. Signs of life persist there, but like a tree partly uprooted by a storm whose fruit continues to ripen and change color from yellow to red. The pine trees are burned and dead. We see a jockey in an Al Capone hat, sitting like a pasha behind a wood brazier with a pot of coffee boiling on it. He smokes, aware that Jawad is looking at him, and avoids his gaze. But Jawad goes up to talk to him about the racetrack and tells him how glad he is to see him, for the presence of the jockey flies in the face of the war’s existence, and life around the track seems to go on much as usual. Horses look out of their box stalls. The trainer sits near the jockey in a short-sleeved shirt drinking coffee. Everyone still treats the jockey as king. He sips his coffee. Steam rises from his cup as he watches the horses, their tails and manes unclipped, roaming idly in the enclosure unattended by a groom.

  We went back to the car, where Ali was waiting patiently, and drove to Sharia Fouad I. I stared intently at it as it flashed past. We stopped once more, this time at an official roadblock. The man said our names weren’t on his piece of paper. Ali got out of the car to see what the problem was, and although we were uneasy at not going straight through, we began to study the shattered remains of the houses and villas and the trees on either side of the road with leaves like green lace and an orange tinge all year round.

  A few minutes later we were at the last checkpoint right beside the Museum. It looked just as it had in the past, as still as the graves and statues inside it. There was always an air of co
ldness about it, as if it had been forgotten opposite the Hospital for Boys and Children, which only had two letters of its name left.

  Jawad said that every time he went past in the bus as a child he wondered why it wasn’t just called the Hospital for Children. He used to want to be a patient there, surrounded by toys.

  Ali said good-bye to us at the Museum crossing and I told him to expect a phone call from me, and urged him not to lose my list of phone numbers. Jawad’s eyes rushed ahead of his memory, feeding it material as we walked away from the car. The buildings and the policemen’s uniforms were the color of sand. He used to come here at the end of every month with his grandmother to see his uncle, who was a policeman stationed here. They would ask for him at the police post and after a few minutes he would emerge with his mother’s medicine, which he obtained at a reduced price. Jawad always envied his uncle’s police tie and had once asked if he could have it.

  I noticed I was no longer so eager to visit the eastern sector. My heart used to pound in my chest like thunder and lightning until I could see someone waiting for me with a car. Even though I had telephone numbers and addresses with me, I used to entertain all sorts of notions, of which the main ones were along the lines of “What if the fighting suddenly starts up and they’ve forgotten to come and meet me?” or “What if the man at the barrier decides to stop me crossing? It would be like holding a flower up to my nose and having it snatched away.”

  Here there were official checkpoints and others which came and went according to the changing situation, and whether you got through or not sometimes depended on the mood of the people manning them, the views of the militia, or the politics, which changed from day to day.

  On my previous visit here when I was only a few steps away from the eastern sector, I had been stopped. The soldier manning the checkpoint looked through my papers and asked me why I wanted to cross.

  “I miss the sea at Jounieh,” I joked.

  “If you miss it, why aren’t you living here where you can see it, and showing them how wrong they are? West Beirut belongs to Iran now.”

  I said nothing, but smiled, and to my astonishment he wouldn’t let me through.

  Even though he had withdrawn the flower before it reached my nose, I kept smiling. He was angry that the city was divided, just as I was. He wanted to express his anger. There was no harm in that; we were both young. He wanted a discussion and so did I, but it wasn’t going to work. A taxi driver drove up to me when he saw me going back, and opened the car door for me, cursing the militiamen. He seemed to have taken it upon himself to get me across whatever my reasons for wanting to go.

  He said they’d been just the same when his son was trying to cross in the other direction. Even when he’d told them his journey was vital, they’d refused to let him through. At that point there had been a sudden burst of gunfire from the western side of the crossing and the militiaman had called him back. “If you want to cross, go ahead,” he’d said, smiling.

  “Did he go?” I asked the driver.

  “Just to spite them, the fool.”

  The taxi traveled at speed along winding backstreets, across crowded thoroughfares, and down deserted roads until we reached a piece of barren ground. He told me to get out and walk across it. “When you see the Pepsi-Cola sign, it means you’re in the right area. There are plenty of taxis there and they’ll take you wherever you want.”

  I wasn’t afraid when he left me on the wasteland. The sight of the sunshine and a distant building with washing hung out to dry on its balconies gave me courage and I set off, sometimes sinking into the sand and sometimes walking on hard dry earth. I was glad to see a few olive trees growing there. They had roots like faces which had been through the war. Even though the main road appeared close, I found myself walking and walking. Was this really happening to me, or was I walking through the vines to have a picnic with my grandmother and Zemzem?

  When I got near the Pepsi-Cola sign, it seemed to be saying, “You’re safe now. You’ve arrived.”

  Would I find my friends, or would my stumbling progress through earth kneaded with urine turn out to have been a waste of time? Just thinking that I was alone in this sector of the city made me sad and a little uneasy, for this was my city too and I had begun to forget its familiar landmarks.

  I spent that night in Jounieh in a room overlooking the sea and was plagued by mosquitoes, as the black coil of repellant went out for no reason. I got up early and went out onto the balcony and leaned over the railing.

  Facing the distant mountains, which listened and watched, I wondered why I didn’t live here. But I had the niggling feeling that my friends were strangers even in their own apartment and weren’t aware of what the road outside looked like, of the trees that grew round about, or the cocks crowing.

  They were refugees living alongside other refugees, and had endured the woes of war and been driven from their homes, so that their vision had become clouded, their humanity a little blurred, and they began to pounce on opportunities of work and elbow out the original inhabitants. I went into the living room. The sight of the empty dishes brought a lump to my throat, reminding me of yesterday’s dinner when my hostess had brought together people who had been at the university with us, the majority of whom had moved in around here over the past months, when their life in the western sector had become impossible. I reproached one of them for not visiting me as he had promised. “Have you severed all your links?”

  “God forbid. But I’ve had to wait around, had some problems. You have to get used to life in this sector.”

  I called my grandmother and she sounded far away. She asked me if the eastern sector was really the jewel they said it was, sparkling with nightclubs and restaurants. I turned around to look at my friends’ chilly expressions. “I’ll tell you about the jewels later.”

  My presence among them must have reminded them of the reality they were trying to forget. Everything was new: their addresses, jobs, homes; only their cars were the same. They had recognized what was going on in the country and settled in these new homes, which they cared nothing for, even though some of them had grown up here. For them the heart of the city was in Sahat Al-Burj and Hamra, in their memories of the rumbling of the streetcars, the neighbor’s voice and the low warm gurgle as she smoked her hookah, the frangipani opening overnight. They tried to hang on where they were, scared of what would happen if their patience ran out, but there was a lot of pressure on them from either side of the divide. Sometimes they rushed back to the bosoms of their families, where they felt a sense of security, for there are times when a person only feels safe in his own surroundings, where he doesn’t have to watch what he says, or apologize, or justify the activities of individuals from his own community.

  My friends still took a keen interest in the news that reached them from the other side. When it was sad news, they chose to believe that the people they knew had escaped unharmed, but they were less discriminating when it came to the reports of how the streets were crammed with men in beards and women enveloped in black, how Iranis were thronging in, new mosques springing up all over the place, Qur’an recitations droning on from morning till night; the streets had all become alleys, sheep pens, chicken runs; at every corner, in the garage of every building was a prison for foreigners and Christians; every Christian who entered the area was pounced on by two men like Solomon’s devils who impaled him on a fork from hell; aircraft only landed to disgorge weapons and fighters. The gulf between the two sectors was widening, not because the access points were being blocked with rubble and iron fencing, but because each was going its own way.

  Where I lived they thought the eastern sector was a jewel suspended between heaven and earth, connected to both by beautiful white bridges, where everything was magnificent: the restaurants, swimming pools, shops. Gesticulating and using their French words, the people there referred to the western sector’s inhabitants as if they were dirty, ferocious animals. The phalangists’ cedar-tree symbol was on eve
ry breast, a gun on every shoulder. Sports cars and armored vehicles raced through the streets. Ships unloaded gold and arms in the ports. The sea, the mountains, and the streets were protected by high walls, reaching to the sky.

  Jawad draws my attention to the white gardenias everywhere; even the chewing-gum vendors have them, and the beggars hovering around a little table in the middle of the sidewalk where men sit playing backgammon, a few feet from large piles of garbage. Drivers have them stuck behind their mirrors and they quiver with each blast of the horn. Street traders’ barrows are decked out with them. There are solemn groups of people at intervals, buying and selling around once elegant shopfronts, poring over secondhand books and magazines, lining up for cut-rate fuel at a mobile gas station, waiting at the movie theater. Jawad says they look like mourners at funerals, and many of them, too, are carrying gardenias.

  Jawad points to the open sea and the peerless sky and exclaims sorrowfully over the tall concrete buildings which block out the view. He searches for the old houses with red-tiled roofs and wooden windows painted red and green, wondering why they always stuck to those two colors. “Goodness me! A ghoul has eaten a bit of the sea!” he cries suddenly. “Goodness me! A ghoul has swallowed a big chunk of mountain!”

  I laugh at his imitation of a village way of speaking which reminds me of my grandmother, feeling warmth and love towards him and wishing he would rest his head on my thighs.

  “They think they’re making a Riviera,” says Jawad scornfully. “A Riviera coast! And over there they’re creating Karbala! That shows they’re both the same. And yet the place is divided in two. They both suffer in the same way, whether they talk about the war or not. Chasing here and there armed to the teeth to secure flour, fuel, medicine, wasting their time and destroying their nerves in all this instability and chaos. Look at them! Their cars are falling apart. And the refugees aren’t happy whichever sector they’re in.”