Beirut Blues

by Hanan al-Shaykh

  But then you began to sound more discontented, asking me enviously if I’d had kibbeh in yogurt recently, even though you’d told me before that you’d met Olga, a Lebanese cook, who came to you once a week and cooked everything you wanted. You began telephoning me, telling the Lebanese exchange when you booked the calls that it was a matter of life and death, and writing disjointed letters as if you were a doctor trying to take the pulse of an anxious patient without him noticing. You would ask me about daily life in Lebanon, the state of security, the electricity, the schools, and I guessed that before you decided whether to return, you were seeing how the land lay, like a bird poised above an island reconnoitering the terrain before it descends. I try to dampen your enthusiasm. “You? In Beirut?” I gasp. “You wouldn’t last a day. And your children? Not a second. Things are still very difficult. Don’t come now.”

  By reacting like this I gave myself an aura of superiority, as if I were better equipped than you to bear the upheavals and disasters. At the time, I didn’t know why I wasn’t encouraging you to return, even though conditions were fine and hopes were emerging that the war might be a thing of the past. It seems to me now that I really believed we existed like two parallel lines, and I wanted to be free in the new Beirut, at first with Naser, then with others; I needed to be certain that the old ties which had unconsciously dominated me in the past did not carry on into the present. I blamed myself for not encouraging you to come back every time I sat by the sea and watched the swimmers enjoying the waves and the sunshine, every time Beirut seemed like a city doing its proper job. I felt your distress when you left, but all the same I did nothing to persuade you to stay; in fact, I probably made you more determined to go, saying untruthfully, “You’re so lucky to be leaving.”

  Your desire for familiar company increased daily. You wanted me to drop in on you so you could enjoy your life, warm yourself as if we were around the stove in your village. Do you remember the Feast of Pentecost when you took me with you to the church and there was a fair set up in the churchyard with swings and stalls and the man they said was a bedouin with a complete set of gold teeth, calling, “Buy your sparrow for the feast. It’s not a feast without a sparrow”?

  We picked bitter oranges and ate cookies and Turkish Delight and when I went home I spoke like the people in your village.

  I don’t think it occurred to you that my presence in your life in exile would only warm you for a short while because I would soon start to feel the cold like you. It would be like a local anesthetic—the effect would wear off and the syringe would be empty.

  You once wrote to me words that remain engraved indelibly on my mind, like a tattoo. “It seems to get more difficult as I and my children get older. Life is harder here, even though you’ve got the war at home. What gloomy future lies in store for us? Abroad you get along with other people on a purely superficial level, but anything else is asking for trouble. The days don’t cut a groove into your memory—it’s as if I get up in the morning and do what I have to do, but never feel more than the faintest glow of pleasure or excitement, and that’s not enough to make life bearable.”

  For all that, here I am sitting in the departure lounge of Beirut International Airport. If I told you that I hadn’t thought much about leaving and had decided under Jawad’s influence, you wouldn’t believe me, or if you did you’d reproach me in your heart, wondering how our long friendship had never prompted me to go, while for the sake of a man, and one attracted to another woman, I was sitting on this airport seat with my clothes sticking to me. You’d say to yourself, “Asma was waiting for a man. So that was her problem, and we got it wrong when we were convinced she couldn’t leave Beirut because she wouldn’t survive away from the place for long.”

  I know I should have told you about Jawad before. I thought about it, but how could I? For that kind of conversation you need to be face-to-face in some private corner away from prying eyes and listening ears. Do you remember that when we wanted to make sure Zemzem or your mother couldn’t follow our conversations, we used to talk in riddles and put feminine endings on and change the boys’ names into girls’ names and collapse into fits of laughter? Could I possibly have booked an international call and sat there in line with all those sad and bewildered-looking people? These calls are expensive nowadays and people use them in emergencies—to say someone’s died or is getting married or going away, or to ask for money. Imagine when my turn came, I’d be shouting from the booth, “Hayat, I’m in love with someone called Jawad. When he takes hold of my finger—picture it, just one finger—it blows my mind. When he holds my head, it’s as if he’s putting his hands on everything—the ideas, the confusions, the past, the beauty, the ugliness. When he holds my breasts, I see flashes of light and become as hot as an oven. I think he’s the first to hold my breasts. The others didn’t notice I had them because they’re so small.”

  Secrets between friends are ageless. I heard from Zemzem that old Zaynab told Naima how her husband once beat his own head in distress when he found ten liras missing from his pocket. Zaynab had said casually, “What’s all the fuss about? I took it to buy a bundle of mint.”

  “What are you telling me?” he roared back. “You put your hand in my pocket without so much as a by-your-leave and took my money?”

  “I’ve never once heard you ask permission,” answered Zaynab as casually as ever, “when you put our hand in my fanny.”

  I know you’ll think of Naser when I tell you about Jawad. Don’t ask me how love finds another branch to thrive on when it seems so dead that thinking about past loves no longer hurts or even makes you feel happy. Recalling what happened with them is like watching a film: you feel detached from it, and if it moves you at all, it is to make you surprised or horrified that you could ever have loved them.

  I’m stopping this letter here, my dear Hayat, because the last bit was private and you won’t be able to understand it all. Not that I doubt your intelligence or your ability to take in situations and ideas, but this is leading me deep into myself, making me turn the matter over and over, leaving no aspect of it undisturbed. If I keep writing to you, it will distract me from my course, even though it has brought hidden things to light: he is the reason why I’m sitting here now. I feel like a pupil preparing for an exam, trying to recall the words and visualize what the pages look like.

  When there were only two days to go before he left Beirut, I found myself talking to him in a dry, cold voice. I wasn’t acting: I had gone over things in my mind and concluded that since he was leaving so soon, I might as well consider him already gone instead of putting both of us through this torment. The subject of his departure had taken over, and the more we tried to push it aside, the more we found ourselves right back at the heart of it. When we tried to lose ourselves in each other’s body, we ended up clinging to one another in apprehension. His leaving ate up the hours. The slow-moving time, which had always lagged behind any other on the earth’s surface, began spinning us around, and the moment we started on anything it alerted us and sent us whirling off again. If I tried to pretend he wasn’t going, I was reminded of it by the evidence of his hurried preparations all around me and the things piling up in my grandfather’s room: his papers, the things he used every day, his navy suitcase, his airline ticket, his shirts ironed by Ruhiyya, the photos he’d taken of us in the country: me by myself, with Juhayna, with Ruhiyya; and Ruhiyya picking pomegranates, smoking, singing, crying.

  Now that he was preparing to leave, I could no longer see what he had enabled me to see in Beirut: the memories of the past, even the squalor and sordid things. All I could smell, all I could see, was rotting garbage. Along with the embroidered cushions, turquoise glass, patterned rugs, and Ruhiyya’s wicker tray, he was taking all that his visit had restored to me and made me cherish again. Although I tried not to give in to these negative feelings, reminding myself that this always happened to me when my friends left Lebanon, and I would be depressed for a few days and then get back into my r
outine, it was different this time. He’d knocked on my door, instead of just pushing it open like Ruhiyya and Zemzem, but then he’d come in without giving me time to get off the bed and look down at the floor. “Give me Hayat’s telephone number and anyone else’s you like. What shall I tell them?”

  I’d asked him to call my friends when he arrived in France. I searched through my drawers and found my little red notebook. As I flicked through the pages he said, “Isn’t that an old one?”

  “Five years old,” I laughed. “Do you think I’m like you?”

  For five years I’d written down special days and dates and phone numbers in Lebanon and abroad. I turn the pages, reading the names and numbers. Hayat. Naser. Iman. Suham. My mother. Other numbers in Cairo, Tunis, the United States. The people pass through my head, jumbled images exploding and scattering like fireworks. All of them are far away, living their own lives.

  “Five years old?” questioned Jawad. “And you haven’t bought a new one? So the future doesn’t exist as far as you’re concerned?”

  “The past is important to me. As it is to you.”

  “It doesn’t seem to be, otherwise you’d keep the notebook with you so you wouldn’t lose touch with your friends. You took ages to find it. You don’t take anything around with you. If I lost my notebook, you know, it would be like losing a piece of myself.”

  “I preserve things in my mind. You have to write everything down to remember it.”

  Ignoring this, he lowered his voice. “I can’t leave you and go away.” The words reverberated inside me, making me tremble, but I answered coldly, “You’ll soon get used to it.”

  “I’ll be anxious about you if you stay here.”

  “It’s the best place to be! It’s you I feel sorry for!”

  He took hold of my head, pressing both hands to my temples so that I couldn’t open my eyes. I felt as if I’d drunk liters of warm wine. When he let go, I was light-headed and ready to burst into tears.

  “Why are you so cold towards me? Do you regret what happened between us? Or do you want me to stay here? Or do you want to come with me? Which is it?”

  All the arguments I’d used to convince myself crumbled away at that moment.

  I don’t want to be separated from him and that makes me feel unburdened, like children who enjoy the present and live only for the moment because they don’t know the past and the future is simply the name of a verb tense which they forget the moment they close their grammar books. So I become a little girl: he can tuck me under his arm and walk off with me or hoist me onto his shoulders so I can view the world from up high. We allow ourselves to be swept back into the current—and regardless of whether it is day or night, there no longer seems to be any need to wait impatiently or panic or pray that time will pass more slowly or more quickly. Night is melting into the pillow, into his body, and into his voice as he tells stories of the past, before the long, slow years of war. Day is springing through the streets with him, busy with my thoughts, visiting places and contradicting him at once when he whispers that I have to come to France with him.

  “Never. Never, I can’t ever. I can’t possibly leave. I want to die here.”

  But it seems I didn’t mean what I said, because when I saw his things everywhere, I began to think about new places, places with horizons. I pictured myself in his apartment: French songs drift in through the window; I’m in that caftan with his foreign friends around me and we’re listening to old Moorish songs and Umm Kulthum. I hurry along in the rain as I used to in Beirut in the old days with my umbrella up, drawn to the lighted cafés, smelling of warmth, coffee, and cigarettes. I walk through the streets at night, feeling as if something exciting is about to happen. In the day I stroll the sidewalks and wear a hat or put a purple streak in my hair. I see films I’ve read about, buy magazines, and the rust of years falls away.

  I looked around me. How could I leave all this? And all this was only the house, with the paint almost peeling off before my eyes.

  “Give me one good reason.”

  I nearly laughed: my decision to stay in Beirut was regarded as more or less unassailable and people had stopped suggesting I leave, even when everything was in a state of violent upheaval. And he was asking me for a reason?

  “Just a minute. If you’re so sure, you shouldn’t be afraid to discuss the ins and outs. Give me one good reason why you don’t want to leave.”

  “My life’s here.”

  “Your life’s here? With your grandmother and Zemzem and Fadila and Ruhiyya? Even Ricardo’s gone. I forgot. Kazim will show up soon, and his brother of course. Who’d look after his chicks for him?”

  I laugh, then prolong my laughter to give myself time to think of an answer. Whenever I’m about to say something, it sounds too vague and doesn’t do justice to my feelings.

  “I don’t have to give a reason.”

  To my surprise he didn’t insist. Instead he took my hand. “Imagine the day after tomorrow. When I’ve gone. Imagine what it will be like without me. Remember what a nice time we had together, even when we fought in the village. We were angry with each other, and we comforted each other. Do you think it’s easy to meet someone who feels with you just as though they were part of you? Think about it.”

  My words tumbled out strangely fast. “I can’t go the day after tomorrow. Let me think about it. I have to organize things.”

  “Pack straightaway and telephone to make a reservation. Then we’ll go and get the ticket. If you don’t have the money I’ll pay for it.”

  “I need time to organize myself.”

  That is, I want to back down. No, I want to go, but I want to prepare myself. Suddenly I began to cry. My emotion took me by surprise. “I don’t have a visa,” I said, and burst into tears again as if I had been planning the trip for ages and had just had my passport returned without a stamp in it. But at the same time I felt like a thief trying to escape before I was arrested. To escape from the place I had believed myself tied to forever by the strength of my feelings. Ruhiyya came rushing from the kitchen at the sound of my convulsive sobs, while Jawad tried to calm me, taking me in his arms in front of her. Although I was embarrassed by her presence, I rested my face on his chest, still sobbing.

  “Stop. Please,” he urged. “I’ll postpone my departure and wait till you get a visa.”

  I found I’d left mascara on his shirt when I took my head away, scared of what Ruhiyya might be thinking. I didn’t have to wonder for long. “What’s going on, Asmahan?” Then to Jawad: “Why are you going to wait? What’s going on? Please tell me.”

  But he ignored her and held on tightly to my head when I fidgeted. I could hear his voice rising in his chest. I’d never been so close to anybody’s voice: he was assuring me that Ali or Musa would see to the visa for me.

  “Sending people to talk for you doesn’t work with the embassies anymore.”

  “You and I will go, then. I’ll take my passport with me and talk to the consul.”

  “What is it? What’s wrong?” cried Ruhiyya again. “You’ll leave your passport in the embassy and it’ll be blown up or something. Then what will we do? Are you trying to kill me?”

  I dressed quickly and put on my shoes, trying to hear what Jawad and Ruhiyya were saying to each other. I splashed rose water on my hands and face. They were talking about me. She was asking him questions and he was replying. I don’t know what he was telling her, but I heard her calling me, and before I could go to her she was in the middle of my room.

  “Do you want to make sure I go to hell? Your grandmother will roast me alive and your grandfather will have me for dinner.”

  “I suppose you’re thinking if I go away with Jawad it means I’ll be living with him. He’s already living with Catherine, in case you’d forgotten.”

  “Good God!” she interrupted. “Is this how we talk now: I’m going to live with him; she’s living with him. Aren’t we going to get married anymore …?”

  “Let me finish,” I cut in. �
��I’m leaving, like most other people. Maybe I’ll go to my mother or my friend Hayat. I don’t know.”

  Because Jawad wasn’t taken aback by this, I decided I would never leave him. Laughing, he gestured towards Ruhiyya. “Anybody would think you were at a funeral!”

  I couldn’t contact the village. How could I be sure of leaving? I’d dreamed that there was a snake going after Hayat’s daughter, and my premonition that I wouldn’t be able to get a visa turned out to be accurate. There was no reply at Ali’s and I tried to contact him on about five other numbers and left messages for him and always met with the same response: “Asmahan. How could anyone forget the name Asmahan?”

  The morning passed and the rest of the day, and evening came and I hadn’t heard from him. Instead, Fadila contacted me to ask me what was happening and whether Musa could help: he had been with one of the people I’d talked to when I was trying to track down Ali.

  “I don’t understand why there’s still a war on when everybody seems to have supernatural hearing,” remarked Jawad in amazement.

  He was telling Musa about the visa before I had time to think, and Musa listened attentively as if he were being briefed for a military exercise.

  “If you’ll excuse me,” he said to us, going off into a corner with his mobile phone, and we could hear him muttering, chuckling, and cursing good-humoredly. When he’d finished, he asked Jawad for his passport and a letter confirming that I was a relative of his and that he’d invited me to spend a vacation in Paris.