“Nobody much. A few artists,” he replied.
I would refuse to get to know other Lebanese. I didn’t want to become like them, missing kibbeh with tomatoes. Like Hayat.
I have to stop wavering. I don’t have any alternative but to leave now. Why am I allowing myself to forget that I felt like a stranger even in my own home? Didn’t I begin these letters by saying that I was a hostage in a place where I no longer understood what people were saying? What’s changed? Why do I think my fellow passengers look like stupid sheep?
When Jawad goes home to France and draws back the curtains, he will find it difficult to know where he is, seeing that he lives in the past and spends his time worrying about it. He will walk along in the cold and see suns everywhere hanging from bunches of grapes and lampposts fixed to militia points and colored leaflets floating down through the skies; people he’s forgotten he ever met will pop up like jack-in-the-boxes. Even if the war hadn’t happened, he would have felt this nostalgia for the past.
“Why go back to places if they’re preserved in your memory?” I asked him once in the shadows of the garden.
“I visit them in the flesh to see how much they’ve changed and how much I’ve changed. Even if I tried, I couldn’t live here anymore and I feel the places themselves don’t want me, but they’re always in my mind and they stop me being content. They won’t let me rest.”
“But they’re one of the main reasons for your success, aren’t they?” I said consolingly, delighted to hear that he suffered a little.
“I know. I pick the bitter fruits of war and write in a Western language about the emotions which lie between my language and my conscience. The more successful I am, the more my conscience troubles me, because I always used to long for this country to be destroyed.”
For the first time I seemed to see Beirut as it really was: a ball inside a ball inside a ball. Dark halls and passages opening into one another endlessly. Unlike most of us, Jawad had chosen his life, or rather gone racing down the path which had opened in front of him. Chance decides how we are inspired to choose one course of action over another. I was conscious that I had reached middle age without noticing. The war was like an express train hurtling along without a stop, taking everything with it. It had deprived me of the opportunity of using the past to live in the present and give shape to the future.
Jawad is scared that the plane won’t take off, and I am scared of admitting that I want to go on providing nourishment for his sentences. He only sees what is in his camera lens and recorded in his notebook. I don’t want to become like him, collecting situations and faces and objects, recording what people around me say, to give my life some meaning away from here. I don’t want to keep my country imprisoned in my memory. For memories, however clear, are just memories obscured and watered down by passing time. There are many empty corners between remembering and forgetting. I want things to be as they are, exposed to the sun and air, not hidden in the twists and turns of my mind. For the first time I wonder if Jawad is insisting on taking me with him, as Hayat wanted to in the past, to be a link with his home, for him to hang onto when he needs it, like a baby’s pacifier.
But what about these war years? If I go, they’ll flow away like wastewater. And if I don’t go, but connect this moment up to the distant past, ignoring the long years of war in between, the burning streams will rise up around me demanding: “What have you achieved? How did you live?”
Jawad is afraid that the aircraft won’t take off; I’m afraid that it will, scared to own up that I feel sad because I’m about to put the war behind me; as if I am not a witness to those who have come and gone and those who have stayed: Maronites, Druzes, Shiites, Palestinians, Syrians, French, Ottomans, Crusaders, the Lebanese Army, the Sixth Fleet, and the Israelis wanting “Peace for Galilee.” How can I put years of patient waiting, fear, and astonishment behind me? Naser made me greet the war gladly like him; Simon showed it to me at close quarters; and now Jawad is trying to take me away from it. What is peace? I carry my war with me wherever I go. I can hear bullets spraying around us now, although the sky is quiet, the mountains are peaceful, and the airport is full of cheerful noise. I want to go back to the house and garden and familiar faces, to the pleasurable feeling when the fighting stops of getting dressed at last and doing my hair. If I try to pin down what made me happy, forcing myself to look back, I have to acknowledge my hypocrisy: I see myself trying to hide from the noise of the battles which pounded through my head until I wanted to scream for help; lying in bed in the darkness able to make out the peeling paintwork, the furniture from my father’s apartment building piled up against the wall, the broken mirrors, the books going back to another age. The house was no longer as it used to be, alive and waiting, with a presence as real and distinctive as our faces.
It upsets me to think I can even consider staying behind, and I want to put my arms around Jawad. When I look at him, all the little physical details I’ve come to know so well crowd in on me and I have a lump in my throat. The dimple in his chin, the single white hair in his eyebrow, his collarbone where it sticks out slightly. How would I be able to sleep soundly ever again, or wake up, without feeling the pain of losing him? Deliberately I picture myself walking around the streets and quays after Naser had left, when I couldn’t get his features out of my mind, and he seemed to have left traces of himself in so many different places. I followed him to the cities by the sea, and when at last he sat opposite me, I was still searching for him. Losing him had split me in two and I had to find the other part of me to believe that he was really there before me. I let my hand pass over the individual pores of his skin, without actually touching him, gazing at the little hairs between his eyebrows, the purplish mole on his neck, the thick eyelashes, stained teeth, brown hands. His wrists were surprisingly slender for someone of his build. Looking at it all set me on edge as if the dentist were probing around in my mouth, and yet I felt detached. Even the voice which used to caress me had become a hollow echo of my memory, bouncing off the lemonade glass, not the voice which triggered off passion when it said, “My darling,” and desire when it murmured, “I’ve missed you. I’ve missed you.”
I knew from the pen in his shirt pocket, even from the color of his shirt, from the portable phone, the way he glanced down the bill before paying it, the tone of voice in which he asked about Beirut, that it was over between us, and that I should have decided this for myself when he left the first time, when the Israelis entered Beirut and Lebanon became a different place, and the Palestinians were thrown into disarray. Inside me I suppose I had known it was over, but needed to weep over the corpse before I could make a new start.
Jawad comes up and announces irritably that the flight will be postponed if the aircraft doesn’t take off within the next two hours, because the airport in Paris won’t accept it after a certain time of night. Unlike me, he hadn’t remained nailed to his seat waiting, but instead seemed to have become hyperactive; the war hadn’t taught him, as it had taught us, either to be in a state of readiness, forgetting everything but trying to stay alive, or to be grateful for the calm periods and make the best of them.
The announcement of a flight to Amman rekindled his enthusiasm. “What do you think about taking any plane out?”
“I’ve only got a visa for France, and Lebanese need them for everywhere these days.” Then I added to comfort him, “They told you the flight might be canceled so you wouldn’t keep asking them. They’d lose a lot of money if they didn’t fly.”
I gave him my hand and felt myself relax. The warmth of it distracted me from the thoughts which had been pitching me to and fro like waves on a turbulent sea, and all I wanted was to be close to him—and how close I was going to be in Paris! He fidgeted restlessly, drew his hand away, and stood up. Perhaps if I’d been able to read his mind I would have seen that he was wishing he was alone so that he could take any flight out. I would never know what was going on in his head.
As I look around me now
, everything seems normal. Even the sight of my shoes reassures me. Medium heels, navy blue: an indication of how peaceful life his become here. However hard I try to summon up the sounds of the fighting, and the fear, isolation, and despair they create, I can only think that the violence won’t return, that the past has really gone for good, leaving behind this pleasant numbness which is rising up from the tips of my toes and spreading all over me. I yawn continually and wonder if I’m too relaxed and peaceful to pick up my suitcase and make my way out to the airplane, never mind endure the trials of the journey. I rise to my feet with difficulty and stand facing him. Gently I take the camera from him and put it down, then take hold of his hands and bend my head over them, indifferent to the crowded airport, kissing the palms and pressing them to my face. The tears come however much I try to hold them in, and splash onto his hands. I wipe them away before I stand face-to-face with him, and tell him that I’ve changed my mind and I’m not going with him.
I see another face, unconnected to the man with the camera, out of place in this airport; the face of the one who walked with me over the stony ground in the village, who took me in his arms on the floor of my house. His eyes are affectionate, angry, and bewildered at the same time. Then anger takes over as he looks right through me, repeating a single incredulous word: “What? What?”
He collapses onto a seat and takes his head in his hands, muttering like a child who’s lost his toy, “My God! I’m not going to let the plane take off till you decide to come.”
I hadn’t pictured he would react like this; it seemed to have slipped my mind that I hadn’t let him take part in my dialogue with myself, this rag doll hauled to and fro by its arms, as my feelings started playing tricks with me like shadows cast on the ceiling. Throughout my internal debates I had treated Jawad as nothing more than a traveling companion.
He comes close so that his knee touched mine and puts his arm around me. “What’s wrong? Are you angry because I said she’d be starting to worry? Do you want me to choose between you? Shall we get married? Just tell me.”
I wriggle free of his arms, embarrassed because of the people around us, but manage a smile and even a nervous little laugh. “I can’t leave. I can’t.”
“What are you afraid of? Perhaps it’s my fault. I didn’t do enough to set your mind at rest about how you’d live. We didn’t discuss the details. We were preoccupied with the visa and Musa, then with the bride and the airport. You’ve got to tell me what’s happened to you in the last three hours.”
He looks around him in confusion, trying to concentrate on what’s being broadcast over the loudspeaker, then resuming his attempts to make me explain myself, incomprehension and fear in his eyes. “If you’ve changed your mind about me, never mind. But don’t confuse the issues. It shouldn’t stop you leaving.”
I don’t feel the pressure of the war like he does, but I begin to cry, waving my head from side to side.
“What’s this for?”
I’m crying because I don’t know how to stop myself. I lift up my head to look at him, but as soon as I notice the pulse in his jaw, and the trembling of the faint growth of stubble on his chin, I can’t bear the thought of not seeing them again, not hearing the voice which has become part of me, like a skin I’ll never shed.
“I love you very much, but I want to stay in Beirut.”
“You love me but you want to stay in Beirut. Do you mean you want me to stay in Beirut? Perhaps it would be better for me. Who knows?”
Stay here and live in the same conditions as me? He’d even lose his delight in words. That’s the effect Beirut has on those who haven’t witnessed its war. It rips the smiles off their faces, then removes their safety helmets, covers their eyes with grimy gauze, daubs their noses with black paste and their tongues with castor oil, and leaves their bodies for the birds to peck. Then the circle shrinks and the wide expanses of land are reduced to a few meters.
“Perhaps you’d like me to stay?”
“No.” And I tell him what I was thinking.
“Why do you want to put up with it yourself?”
I had read what he’d written in his notebook when he’d left it lying on his seat:
“I’ve discovered that my nostalgia was just because of being a foreigner in France. How I longed for the self I thought was somewhere else. Well, I seem to have spoiled the dream by coming back. I feel as if I’ve never seen this land before and never knew the people. Instead of mountains I saw concrete in a country which has become as black as night: the walls are black, the soldiers are dressed in black. The countryside is charred and burned, and the population is living on top of the biggest arsenal in the world.”
“What do you do here apart from gossip?” he asks me now. “Your whole life’s focused around making sure you have a supply of electricity, water, and food and avoiding the bombs. It’s as if you can only live in this twilight world between war and not-war. This doesn’t have to be what life’s about, you know. There’s a whole big world out there.”
“I don’t want to turn into one of those pathetic creatures who are always homesick, always saying I wish I were still in Beirut. I don’t want to become like you, split between here and there. I know I’m not happy here, but why should I be unhappy in two countries?”
“Why are you thinking of all these things in advance? Try it and then decide.”
“It’s easier living in the middle of what upsets you than running away from it and worrying at a distance. Things seem worse from a distance.”
“I don’t understand why you’re anticipating being depressed in either place. Come, and see how you feel in a few weeks or months.” He pauses wearily, then seems to feel compelled to go on speaking. “Beirut’s an excuse. You hide behind it because you’re scared to begin a new life. I want to help you think about something else besides electricity and water and rediscover the world beyond this place.”
Beirut International Airport. Beirut. I seemed to hear the word for the first time and I repeated it several times. Beirut. I saw it written. I saw it on the map, on postcards. Zaytouna. Ma’rad. Martyrs Square. Riad Al-Solh. On photographs and pictures in foreign books. I saw it written, the letters forming a child’s cart with big wheels, or the collar of my school uniform.
It was as if it had been branded on my mind in the course of the war. Beirut at war takes on bulk and shape. I can hold onto it, whereas in peacetime, life was like a garage full of spare parts and broken-down vehicles and I didn’t know where to begin with it. Now I picture Beirut as a big pit in the ground, all small furrows and hollows and cavities, barren except for clumps of green grass clinging to its sides. I began my letters saying that I was a hostage and now I’m trying to see these little plants growing, as they are all that my land produces. My life is here and every country has its own life.
“You’ve become addicted to this war, you know.”
I say nothing.
“You’re afraid that if you leave here, you’ll no longer be a queen like you were in Beirut, with the neighbors and Fadila and Ricardo. You’re forgetting that your experiences will make you much more interesting than anyone who left at the beginning and has stayed in Paris ever since.”
“They say that to travel is to die a little death. In any case, I’m not in the least curious about life in Paris.”
“Why do you think that is? It’s because you’re lazy, and afraid.”
“Maybe if I’d left before, I’d think differently, but each country has its own way of life and my life is here.”
“What about me? Where do I stand?”
I gather all my hair to one side and chew on my lips and say nothing.
“That’s a stupid question. It’s probably not the right time to ask,” he says.
I saw everything I had left behind in Beirut through a fine veil of nostalgia, perhaps because of the distinctive atmosphere of airports, although I knew I would soon view it once more as a tawdry, run-down circus.
Whenever the pulse in his h
and beat faster, I felt the beads of sweat breaking out on me and smelled it mixed with his smell and began to have second thoughts and wonder if what I’d been saying amounted to nothing.
Jawad stops trying to persuade me and just looks at me, then kisses my hand from time to time, punctuating his actions with a shake of the head. He touches my cheek and says he’s already missing me, then takes my hands impulsively in his again and I’m holding them out eagerly like an orphan to touch his lips and feel the currents of desire running through them, and then he’s saying imploringly that I must follow him tomorrow or the next day.
I’ll follow him now. As soon as our flight is announced I’ll stand up and we’ll go together. I can’t envisage staying here alone, watching him go off without me.
I’m happy to have made this decision and want to surprise him and I’m the one to take his hand this time and bring it up to my face as if I’m telling him what I’ve decided. He, meanwhile, is trying to recover his composure. “What do I have to do to make you leave?” he asks. “Perhaps if you had everything running on batteries, even your hair dryer, you’d find your life here suddenly had no purpose.”
“The suitcase!” we both shout at the same time, suddenly remembering.
“What do you want to do about it?”
So I don’t tell him I’ll come with him after all—as a matter of fact, I relax because he’s accepted the fact that I’m staying, and he seems to think he made the decision himself.
“I’ll leave it—otherwise you’ll be here all day.”
“Good. If you leave your things with me, you’ll have to come and get them.” Then, as if he has caught sight of an image gleaming at him through his camera lens: “Now, what shall I do with your clothes when I get there? I’m going to keep them all mixed up with mine.”
Beirut Blues Page 31