Beirut Blues

by Hanan al-Shaykh

  Why the decor—the artificial bunches of grapes, the loud colors on the walls, the awkward, ugly chairs? What I saw provoked powerful physical sensations of rage and bewilderment. What was the relationship of taste to the war? Why did the songs sound as if they were composed by someone in his bath?

  The people make a city, and these were strangers. Although they filled the room, I could only see empty spaces.

  Jawad and I felt we were in constant communication through what we were thinking, and had no need to talk over the uproar. Some of these rowdy men dancing and shouting had opened businesses with stolen capital and precious artifacts taken from shops and houses. Some of them mixed with well-known people who had active roles in the parties, and long-standing businessmen who had found religious loopholes allowing them to charge interest to their hearts’ desire. There were plenty of drug dealers among them: prewar exiles coming back with capital, eager for status and prestige now the arena was empty of those who deserved it. Musa pointed out a man working as an intermediary between kidnap groups and hostages’ families. “His life’s in the balance,” he remarked laconically.

  At some of the tables were people like Jawad and me, who’d come to see what had happened to you and your inhabitants, and others, like Ruhiyya and Fadila, eager to belong to the world of the rich, if only for a night.

  After a while Jawad and I wanted to go home: what we saw was making us miserable. “Rats in fancy clothes,” was Jawad’s accurate description.

  We were dependent on Musa to see us back, as the city no longer gave us our freedom for nothing, so we left Ruhiyya and Fadila alone, on condition that Musa would come back for them; they couldn’t understand why we wanted to leave “when things are really humming.”

  We stood in the garden. What was going to happen between us when we went up the steps? We breathed to a single rhythm; our words anticipated each other’s thoughts. The need for close physical contact generated by the atmosphere of the city was affecting us both now. We were an island surrounded by heaving waters full of crocodiles. The electricity was off and everything was in darkness. Thought was paralyzed in such an atmosphere; I was like a witch leading an innocent stranger to her castle and working her magic by isolating him there for days on end until he was dependent on her for his survival.

  For a while Jawad had been immersed in his fascination with the past, his desire to find out about the old ways, and blind to the present. Then one day he opened his eyes and saw the dark streets and heaps of garbage, the sound of the generators penetrated his carapace of tolerance, and the noise and murky fumes started to get him down. He began listening to the news and found it didn’t make sense. Even the television irritated him, because of the clothes the announcers wore, the ideas expressed, or the banal songs. The newspapers no longer provided him with a hunting ground for his sarcastic jokes; it almost seemed to cause him physical pain to read of the senselessness of what was happening.

  “Do you remember, Asmahan, I told you about the girl I used to be in love with before I left here, the time I grabbed hold of her by the hair when we were visiting an old fort and said, ‘Don’t wait for me. I don’t want to stand in your way. When I come back, we’ll see if you still love me.’ ”

  He takes hold of my hair and says, “I grabbed a handful of her hair and put my mouth on hers and kissed her so hard I almost suffocated her.”

  He puts his lips on mine and kisses me hard and doesn’t suffocate me; I kiss him back.

  We stand by the garden pond breathing in the diesel fumes from the generators. He asks me why we’ve filled up the pond with stones. I remember how I never used to be able to get to sleep unless I could hear the sound of the water running from its little tap. I can picture what the tap looked like; the neighbors’ son Bahij, who’s about twelve, broke it off; metal is his obsession and he takes away anything movable made out of metal and sells it; he was known as Bahij the Metal. Jawad puts his arm around me as I tell him about the pond and Bahij the Metal, and presses my shoulder. I seem to have been expecting it. I want to throw myself on him, I don’t care where, just throw myself on top of him with all my weight. But I remain frozen, even though I haven’t felt like this since my first dance with an adolescent boy.

  He is going in two days. Why do relationships require physical contact to develop? Why can’t this continue when we are far apart? I picture myself writing letters, waiting for his. When I try to imagine what I would write, I can hardly think of anything. For he has already preserved his days here: the plains reaching to the horizon, the vine trellises, the blackened landscapes, the rocky hilltops. He found out about the contradictions when he called his girlfriend in France from the post office in the neighboring village. He didn’t believe that on a hillside in this devastated land a post office had been built, fully equipped and staffed. Up above, it was a beehive where the bees still returned to swarm. Nobody dared to go there but Hashim, who launched a surprise attack on the hive, roping himself to the rocks above and swinging down the rock face to reach the honeycomb.

  I drew my lip from between his and went into my room without a word. I threw myself down on the bed, picking up the mirror which I left there before dinner, when I was trying to see what he saw in my face. But it didn’t bother me anymore; the electricity was off and I wasn’t going to switch on the generator, because I couldn’t stand the thought of the noise. What’s more, I was trying to be like a mole and pick up every movement Jawad made. The neighborhood generators had gone quiet because of the lateness of the hour, although the noise of the nightclub was still loud in my ears. I chased away the images and tried to make myself indifferent, saying out loud, “People have to live a little.”

  I didn’t think about the nightclub for long, because I was wondering whether my body was alerted by love or wine. Why didn’t he knock on my door? Why couldn’t I hear him in the kitchen or the living room? I jumped up suddenly as if I was supposed to be meeting him and had forgotten about it. When I opened my bedroom door, I heard his voice from the living room asking me how to make the electricity come on. The thought that Ruhiyya must be coming back any moment flew out of my head the moment he came near me, so that the darkness entered us both and we vanished like the things around us, of which only the vaguest outlines were visible, or perhaps we just knew they were there but couldn’t really see them. I was losing myself suddenly, losing the thread which tied me down to life, and flying like a bird. Our conversation became bolder as if it didn’t really count because we were in the dark. My body took me by surprise as usual and I felt it begin to throb, and I smiled because Jawad couldn’t see what was happening to me. We both became bolder and our breathing was like the light suddenly being switched on to reveal everything. His fingers reached out to touch my face, and I knew they were what I’d been waiting for all those years; they blotted out the music and noise, the faces with too much makeup, the mouths full of food and the gyrating stomachs; this tenderness was all that was left.

  As we moved in close together and I felt his breath on my face where his fingers had been, he asked me in a whisper if he could go on, and how I was feeling. I liked this hesitation, which I had never encountered in the others, this circumspection, this strength of will. The war here and his life in Europe hadn’t given him the feeling that everything was permissible, all the barriers down. The fact that I was lying here like this had no connection with the war and the lack of permanence. I had moved far away from the living room floor, my grandmother’s house, the western sector. The desire to hold onto him wasn’t like a drug, or because life went on and there was always someone somewhere being born or dying or having sex. I was lying on the carpet where I used to play as a child, and which I used to race across to go to school or meet a friend in my adolescence. For the first time I wasn’t shutting off my feelings of love and desire as I entered the house, or transforming them into daydreams.

  I discover that making love isn’t as easy as it used to be. I’m far away despite my desire for him, e
xpecting far more than this kissing and touching and holding. I take hold of my mass of thoughts and it’s like picking up a heavy bird which has begun to walk rapidly along a piano keyboard sounding a jumble of different notes. This closeness has put a bubble in my veins and started to shift the sluggish blood along and make me breathe more deeply, restoring some spontaneity where before was only grim determination. I crave his lips, my hands grip his shoulders, his chest crushes me, and his face is immersed in mine, but more than sex this is a way to great calm, as if existence had been poised on one foot and has at last regained its balance. Jawad’s eyes look into the distance, then focus on me. I pull him to me and call out loud, “I love you. I love you.”

  He must be wondering why I’m not trembling with pleasure, what’s stopping me even responding to him if I love him as I cry out that I do. Is everything in me blocked and sterile like my work, my future, my car engine which cuts out as soon as I turn the key in the ignition? Do I breathe like a spinster? Have I got the body of a dried-up old maid, although I feel as slippery as if I’ve oiled myself inside? Of course I was talking to him as I chased the bird which hopped over the piano keys, shifting from black to white; I talk to him in my head as he continues to crouch over me, embracing me, marveling that despite all the heat I’m giving off, I’m not in time with him. I wish I could tell him that I can really feel him, not only inside me but to the very ends of my body and all around it, but I want more than this cohesion of muscle, tendon, bone joint. “More, more, more,” I mumble, and he gets up and walks about the room.

  After a long silence I put on a shocked voice and say, “Imagine if the electricity came back on now and Ruhiyya saw you.”

  “I wish I could understand what is the matter with you,” he says.

  I used to be certain that I would be all over Jawad like ink on a white sheet, spreading out and running in every direction until I was part of the fabric, so what is happening to me? Has seeing life diminished by the terrible dancing creatures in the nightclub made me wither like a flower snapped off a bush?

  We couldn’t begin a discussion: it was difficult if I didn’t know what was wrong with me; but he took my face tenderly in his hands again and asked if I wanted him to carry me to my bed.

  I clung to his neck as he picked me up and almost dropped me. I remembered Naser’s back pains, then quickly drove the thought from my mind, as I usually did when it concerned Naser. I smiled to hear Jawad saying, “Good heavens. How heavy you are. Like a lump of concrete.”

  “Is she as heavy as me?” I tease.

  He says nothing.

  “Soon you’ll be carrying her around.”

  He throws me onto the bed. The metal springs bounce me back towards him. A wave of happiness rushes over me. My bed is different, laughing as it receives me with the one I love. We are in the house which thinks it’s there for everything but lovemaking. It witnesses births, marriages, deaths, people moving in and moving out, but not love. It’s not used to lovers joining in the room of childhood and adolescence; they go far away so that they can let their bodies do as they please.

  As I think these thoughts, I feel the house embracing me suddenly, giving out its warmth to me. The furniture watches and greets the union with gladness, breathing softly around us. I have not felt this relaxed with any man before. My roving encounters with Naser hardly made our relationship secure; there was no bed which we used habitually, no sofa whose color stuck in my mind, no room which brought back certain words. Terror lurked constantly at the back of my mind and in the corners of my lips at the thought that his enemies might choose these intimate moments to attack.

  Jawad touches my lips again, my arms, and releases me from the throng of thoughts and images and makes them lie dormant.

  I followed him seconds after he had left for his own bed, and he was waiting for me; he made a space for me when he heard my footsteps, put his arm around me, and asked me, “Do girls here leave things to nature or do they use something?”

  I just laughed, and then he began to breathe regularly so that I knew he was asleep. I studied his face; I was a little girl and this was my grandfather breathing reassuringly beside me, and everything was all right: the top window had been broken by local boys with a sling, not by sniper fire. Then I hear Jawad’s voice as if in a dream, telling me that I’m just like my mother and that’s how he recognized me after all these years.

  He was a child when my mother visited them, in a long brown split skirt with a fox fur around her shoulders and dark red lipstick. She smoked a cigarette which she hid each time she heard footsteps, sings songs and laughed loudly. This image of her stayed in his mind for a long time afterwards.

  He puts his arms around me. “It’s incredible,” he whispers. “Here I am with her daughter. It must be fate.”

  I lay without moving. I wanted to turn over as usual but I was afraid of disturbing him. I must have fallen asleep in the end, because I woke up and the light was streaming into the room and I heard Ruhiyya moving about in the kitchen. A feeling of sadness overwhelmed me when I saw his suitcase. I tried to extricate myself from the embrace of his arms and thighs but he held me tighter. “You can’t go,” he muttered, his eyes tightly shut.

  “Ruhiyya,” I said, pretending to be flustered.

  “Let her see us together. She can make up a song about us.”

  As I try to get up I want to ask him if he loves me, but I can’t bring myself to, then the sight of our limbs entwined under the cover gives me courage and I wonder how I could have felt shy.

  The Last Letter

  My Dear Hayat,

  Although these long days passing have created a gulf between us, you’re still my friend Hayat, the wall off which I bounce my thoughts—happy, painful, immoral sometimes—and yet I never detect any scorn in your eyes. Do I? I think I see only love. How wrong I was when I convinced myself that we had set off along two parallel tracks which would never meet again: the very fact that if I feel uneasy about something I can only dispel it by analyzing your circumstances in relation to mine means you are still there.

  You are with me now in the departure lounge of Beirut International Airport. Do you remember the word “International” huge and black on its walls? The point is, I’m trying to ask your advice, but you disappear just as I’m about to hear your reply. Or is it that I don’t want to hear it? I’m sitting here now, a mass of confusion, uncertain whether to focus on Jawad, myself, the waiter, or the other passengers, and I see you pushing them all aside and coming towards me. It’s strange: you who are far away occupy my thoughts now, and not those I have just left who must be somewhere around the airport, waiting for my plane to take off. Is it because I always connect you with this airport, as I normally only come here to meet you or see you off, and it sometimes seems as if people only leave here to take things to you?

  You never let slip an opportunity to urge me to leave too; I hear your voice, read your letters: you’re like a school headmistress trying to rustle up business with an enthusiasm which can be troublesome, and make me feel sometimes I am being hounded by you, although I never need to ask why. I know you can’t understand why I stay in the flames while where you live even the sound of people’s voices is calm and reassuring. I know you’re afraid for me, but this fear must be accompanied by some pangs of conscience and the flames spread to create a dense wall between those who have stayed and those who have left. This feeling must have disturbed your stays here and made you wish you were far away from all the commotion, enjoying an atmosphere where the biggest disturbances were caused by thunderstorms.

  Even during periods of calm in Beirut, when the sky was closer to its original blue, you were telling me to leave. I realized then from the tone of your voice that you weren’t afraid of me dying or missing out on a husband or a future, but you were scared for yourself. Your life had never led you into dark labyrinths before: you were born into an exemplary family; from an early age you were aware that you were being fed with a silver spoon, which
had been your mother’s before you and which you were to preserve so that your own children could use it one day. So you went on dates with boys to compete with other girls, to find out whether your face was pretty and your body desirable, not to find a husband. Even education was not for the sake of knowledge but simply so that you could get a job which would give you a certain status in society.

  You used to believe that the world consisted of the earth and the sky, and that everybody lived in beautiful houses, which they made beautiful if they were ordinary, then produced children forever and ever. Death would never dare enter the solid walls of your family house, disrupt its order, mar its beauty. So as soon as war broke out you packed your bags without stopping for a moment to ask what was going on or who had unleashed this violence. You were more concerned about whether the airport would be blown to bits. Now, my dear, the people mix ash with water because soap is so expensive, and water is scarce. I think how I used to wash my hair with clean water every day not so long ago, ignoring Zemzem’s instructions to be sparing and only use it for vital washing.

  I used to listen to you insisting that you were really happy, and so were your children, and repeating your invitation to me. When I tried to find out what your life was really like, you seemed at a loss and I drew my own conclusions.

  “My life?” you would say after a bit. “It’s the same as usual. Yesterday I went to an exhibition and was introduced to someone in the art world here, then I went to a movie in the afternoon and enrolled in a yoga club.”

  As time went by, the tone of your voice changed. You’d been in exile longer and you must have found out that you were only on the fringes of life in this Western country: its politics didn’t concern you and its social problems had no effect on you. The weather was about the only thing you remarked on to its inhabitants; it brought you closer to them, although you couldn’t handle it the same way they did; you were still tied into a four-season cycle and if a heat wave struck in early spring, you were thrown into disarray, for you’d put your summer clothes in trunks like you did in Lebanon. Only when you got a job did you become part of the place, but it didn’t change you or even affect the tone in which you spoke, except for the note of weariness creeping in. “What am I doing? The same as usual. Work and more work. Movies, galleries, yoga.”