Beirut Noir

by Iman Humaydan

  And all throughout, Eesh was looking at me squirm like a worm, all tattooed and riddled with wounds, skinny and hairy, revolting in everything and in every way, and she was crying. And who could possibly blame her? Look at me, what kind of father could I possibly be?

  Originally written in English.

  The Boxes

  by MAZEN MAAROUF

  Caracas

  1.

  When I was very young, twenty-one years before this moment, my name was Yamen. I loved little boxes and I know that they loved me too. We agreed that we were just the same. In everything. In our smells, our way of walking, how we closed our eyes, those things. I used to see boxes as six closed eyes connected to each other. I had only two eyes, like all people, animals, and birds. But I practiced closing them like boxes did. Completely vertical. And I still practice. I never manage it completely—when I close my eyes and touch my drooping eyelids, I find that they aren’t completely vertical. How can I describe this to you all? I don’t know. They just aren’t vertical, they aren’t straight like a ruler. And so I practice. And the boxes know that and wait for me to succeed so they can be happy like me. Because practice will make us resemble each other, even if it takes a number of years. The important thing is to get there. And this is what helps me to sleep better every night.

  My mother doesn’t wake me up because there’s no reason to wake me up. Schools are closed because it’s summer vacation. Or because the war is about to start. Or both. The important thing is that I’m sleeping more and that even while asleep I am practicing tightening my eyelids so that they come down completely vertical.

  But I also practice another thing. Each and every day, I practice rolling like a box. On the carpet. I bend my knees and ball myself up so that my arms are at a right angle to my chest. I then try to push myself up. This exercise is also difficult. Especially the stage when you have to turn yourself upside down and balance on just your head and knees. If our house were positioned on a slope like our building is, then this would surely be much easier. I wouldn’t have minded rolling myself down the slope had there not been so many cars there, as well as the residents of our building and the building next to ours who greeted passersby, even strangers, by throwing things at them—potatoes, empty cans of sardines, bottle tops, balloons filled with dirty water, and other things.

  I came to an agreement with the boxes I made that we’d change every day. And they accepted it. In reality, that’s because I wasn’t able to make boxes of the same size every day. Indeed, what I made weren’t exactly boxes, but rather forms very much like boxes, so much so that if you saw them you couldn’t call them anything other than boxes, unless you were a math professor or a carpenter. But the boxes didn’t think about all this. All they cared about was being closed on all sides. And empty. I valued that a lot because everything around me was getting bigger, increasing in size. Even the cities being destroyed had something in them that was expanding and filling them up. I don’t know what to call it, but when I look in a history book at two pictures of this city before the war and during the war, a feeling inside me tells me that something in the city had grown and expanded in the second picture.

  My intense love for boxes made me want to visit a number of places around the world with them. When I thought about all the countries of the world, I thought about the amusement parks in those countries. And I decided to not take the boxes there. No doubt, like me they would see many children flying toward giant, colorful rides—swinging and flying and crawling and bouncing around—and not one of them would be interested in what a small box could do. In those foreign countries I wouldn’t allow myself to wander around among the children whose languages I couldn’t even speak, to convince them of the power of a small box to carry the whole world around in parts and move it to other places.

  For the sake of these boxes alone, not for my own sake, I wanted to copy myself like you copy a piece of paper in a photocopy machine. Then I would put each copy of myself into a small box. Afterward, I would become closed and empty like them. And I would leave the boxes in places far away from each other. Nothing would bring them together. One of the places would perhaps be a cave. Perhaps the second place would be some fancy, decorated trunk at the bottom of the sea. Perhaps the third place would be a hill of debris made of old telephones in a village very far from here.

  2.

  That was all I wanted to know about the power of small wooden boxes before I got close to Nazmi. I became his good friend when he started to help me collect wood. He used to steal it from the shop at the bottom of the slope, where he worked. But this shouldn’t lead anyone to believe that he was one of those bad boys in the neighborhood. As for me, when I learned the wood was stolen I didn’t get angry with him. I didn’t care about the circumstances that brought the wood to my house. Indeed, I urged him to bring more. I would use all the expressions that meant bring me when I talked to him. But I didn’t ever once utter the word steal.

  It’s important to remember the first time we had a conversation about the usefulness of wood. I realized that he was a simple man and that is all anyone knew about him. My realization was not because of my great insight. No boy of eleven is able to use insightful as word to describe himself. I believe in order to be insightful you shouldn’t ever sleep. You should constantly observe everything around you. Like someone spying on everything—no matter whether moving or still—in order to live some additional days. I can’t be insightful. I don’t want to warn anyone about anything. It’s as if I need to sleep and practice closing my eyelids vertically, and I still can’t manage to do it. I can’t speak about the paths of the planets, or about people’s lives either, because I haven’t delved into these things. I don’t mind becoming a part of any life that others might suggest for me in the future; however, I’m busy right now. I don’t have time. My preoccupations are deep and confined to the boxes. Raising them higher. I don’t know how.

  In addition to the question of the eyelids, I also have to practice rolling on the rug, as I mentioned before. Then there’s my interest in Nazmi’s story. Now. Telling it with no additions or deletions. Because he was simple and his life didn’t require any explanations, excess letters, or doctors. In the beginning of our friendship he assigned me the nickname “Eraser.” The name embarrassed me. It embarrassed me a lot and I was afraid it would stick to me. But then I added up the weight of his daily misery—carrying heavy gas cylinders on his shoulder, from the foot of the hill all the way up to the top, to the top floor of the tallest building, so he could install it with the help of a heavy screwdriver—“the wrench,” as we used to call it. Sometimes he had to go back down the hill again to the street and search for it because it had slipped out of the back pocket of his loose trousers without him noticing. When I thought about all this, I felt that Eraser was a nice compensation. And that he wouldn’t call me this name were he not convinced of my ability to erase his daily misery in minutes, those very same minutes we spend at night on the roof of the building throwing wooden boxes in the air.

  “Up! Up! To the top of the hill! To the top floor!” he shouted, shutting his eyes tight. He closed them as if they were extraneous things on his face.

  So I corrected him: “The sky isn’t the beginning of the incline, and it isn’t the top floor at the beginning of the incline. The sky is farther away. A lot farther than that. Farther than the top of a column or the horn of a truck.”

  He asked me, “When will we get there?”

  He often asked questions like this. Difficult ones that I didn’t know anything about. I felt that these questions were very serious. More serious than me and all my thoughts. They used to spoil my woodworking projects for a moment. But I started to love him like someone who loves a burden. A burden of small boxes. Indeed, I felt that I was responsible for him, so I shared my secret with him about the relationship of boxes to space, and particularly the stars. He hadn’t seen stars before. That’s what he told me. I got frustrated a lot. And I blamed him. But he
’d be perplexed and tell me that this wasn’t a fault of his whole body, but a fault of his head alone, in fact a very small part of his head, the part that hadn’t ever thought of looking at the sky at night . . .

  But from the time he first found out about the existence of stars, he started carrying gas canisters to houses along the incline all day long—up Beirut’s Caracas Hill—while staring at the sky. He would stare and wonder if the stars were really there. Are all these stars merely a trick of the night? I am sure he meant an evil trick. I expended all my energy trying to convince him that the stars were actually there, but I couldn’t. I didn’t care. Until one evening when I told him, “We’ll throw wooden boxes up toward space.”

  And he followed up enthusiastically, “Stars?”

  But I carried on, ignoring what he was saying because I had started to get irritated. “The boxes will come back to us bringing us things that no one has read about before. Special kinds of signs. Small, secret signs, lost long ago, which will ride in the boxes. Because they have been waiting for the boxes for a long time. Someday, you and I will get all these boxes after they come back. We will catch things much more valuable than stars. We will catch a dictionary.”

  I told him this in a serious tone. But after that I tried at home to speculate as to what these signs that I’d mentioned could mean to him. I needed only one sign, one clear and obvious sign easy for a young boy like me to explain to someone. To Nazmi. To convince him of it and its relevance to all things in existence. His imagination was weak. He felt that his head lived on its own, although the two of them—him and his head—were attached. Like a medicine capsule. I used to notice that his head was really oval shaped. He laughed and I laughed along with him. He said, “My head lives above me. It sees everything it wants, it doesn’t care, I have nothing to do with it. As for me, I live underneath it. I have two eyes that I can’t see without. I see with them and I only think things that come to me through them.”

  For a moment I was convinced that Nazmi wasn’t just a simple child. But all that disappeared when I realized that I needed a sign. A special sign that he’d seen before and through which he could be convinced of my secret about the relationship of boxes to space.

  I recalled all the conversations that we’d had. The next day, I resolved to emerge from this battle victorious. I told him, “You know, in olden times, there were people like us. But this incline wasn’t here. Where was it? Scattered all around somewhere else. It’s merely ‘things’ collected from faraway places that were brought here. They came here and became an incline. But someone collected these things. Perhaps it was a boy. Merely a boy like us. He used wooden boxes or perhaps he had a different way. The important thing is that he collected them, guided by signs. Special signs. Every ‘thing’ has a special mark, distinguishing it from any other ‘thing.’ Everything becomes old and rots. Like bread. It crumbles. Even if you do everything you can to prevent it. Even if you go now and use all the strength in your arms to set up the incline in reverse, it would rot and everything in it would also rot after a while.”

  But he seemed not to understand anything I said. I remembered what he told me about his head and his eyes. And I gathered that his head perhaps understood my words but his eyes, no.

  To make matters easier and not just for his eyes, for myself also, I simplified the story: “Let’s start with the shop. You see it every day. It will be taken apart. The display. The stuff in it. The shelves. The refrigerators. The magazine displays. The cash register. The scale for vegetables and fruit. The storage room at the back. The bathroom. The basement filled with rats and mice. Everything in it will decompose into small pieces and wait. What we will have at the bottom of the street won’t be a shop but a mound of these pieces mixed up all together. But gathering together all these pieces and returning them to what they were isn’t difficult. Because each of them has a special sign. And the boxes that we will send up into space will leave. That’s for sure. But they’ll come back to us one day with special signs for everything as a whole. We will compile a big dictionary of all these signs. The biggest dictionary of life. Of everything in life.”

  He asked me, “Does every star in the sky have a special sign for it too?”

  “Of course,” I answered fervently, and then added, “I heard that gathering all these pieces together will fall on our shoulders. This is what older people always do with younger people. We have to be prepared. The wooden boxes are my plan. What I told you about the shop will also happen to the incline, the football stadium, the Ferris wheel at the amusement park, the Rawda coffee shop, the pool, every building, shop, closet, washing machine, television, window, metal . . . everything. We’ll move this entire incline somewhere else and it will become ours. We could even set it up differently than it is now. We could, for example, return it to what it used to be. To years past. If we seize the signs, the incline will be ours. Yours and mine.”

  But he was silent. He showed no interest whatsoever in the question of owning the incline. But he asked me, “If everything disintegrates into fragments, what will we do when the small wooden boxes also decompose into fragments? Yes. How do you know they won’t decompose before coming back to us?”

  I was struck dumb.

  Then he asked, “Has your tongue decomposed, Eraser?”

  I stuck out my tongue at him to show him that it was still there. Then we started laughing very hard. I was sure that when I laughed with Nazmi, a thick, cool, white foam was intensifying, taking on the form of birds near a wooden bench for strange people who we don’t know. The people feed seeds to that foam, thinking that it’s really birds, and when they feed it, it increases and thickens further and we can no longer stop laughing.

  3.

  I’m not a clever box maker. Especially small boxes. I use the wood that Nazmi brings to me, cutting it with a blade. Though it’s fine wood and possible to break by hand, or by foot, I used to cut it with a knife. By hand or foot, splinters fall from it that I then have to snap with my fingers.

  Once, while I was passing the blade over a wooden board, it left a dark line that wasn’t lead but looked like it. I deduced that I had to use a lead pencil to mark the wood before cutting it. I started putting it behind my ear like carpenters do when walking down the street. Because I was afraid that the blade had done that in order to join the lead pencil to it, while I was away at work. The next day I brought the blade a home, a broken case. After work, I inserted a screw into the blade’s open belly and twisted it a little so it couldn’t come out of the case and injure anyone. Because it wasn’t designed to cut wood, I avoided putting pressure on it during work so it wouldn’t get stuck inside the wood or harm its blade. This would have required me to pass over the same line again, and this is what explains my long-term obsession with constructing boxes. People used to call this “respect.” But it caused my fingertips to swell. Though I didn’t cry. I didn’t cry even once, especially not in front of the boxes.

  I also had nails, thread, pipe, glue, and adhesive tape. I didn’t use the nails but saved them until I could buy a hammer. Sometimes I cut the thread with my teeth and sometimes that hurt. Once I lost a milk tooth when the thread got stuck around it when I was pulling on it. Right afterward, mothers in the building started to use string to pull out their children’s loose teeth.

  In the evening, I used to tuck the small boxes into my schoolbag. I would refuse to let my mother sell the bag at the end of the summer like she did at the beginning of every school year. But I didn’t completely fill the bag with boxes. I had to leave some space. A space the size of the sleeve of a sweater. I’m not talking about the sleeve of my sweater, but the sleeve of Nazmi’s sweater. Nazmi, who was perhaps my friend and perhaps not. What I do know is that Nazmi was three or four years older than me, and after I tucked the boxes in the bag, I was sure that the empty space left was the size of his hand. Every day, I kept saying to myself, Today. Today I will let him take the first box from the bag.

  But I didn’t foll
ow through on my decision after all. I didn’t trust Nazmi’s ability to control his strength, especially when he was excited. What if his hand broke the box while removing it from the bag? Shattered it into fragments? We would fight. Nazmi would be angry and feel sorry for me, and he would kneel in front of the building’s entrance and hit his head against the edge of the cement until it bled. As usual, children his own age would circle around him and make fun of him. I was really afraid of the sight of blood. Even before the war came down onto our street overlooking the sea. It dates back to the time I saw Zuhayr, the son of the vegetable seller, covered in blood after he fell from the chains of the spinning electric swing in the amusement park. Nazmi didn’t apologize. Because no one taught him that when we make a mistake we apologize. But we knew it. Everyone in the neighborhood knew it. When he made a mistake, he would do everything he could to convince us that it wouldn’t happen again. So the next time Nazmi would insist on taking the first box out of the bag, but I was sure that he—like the time before—would crush it in his strong hand like a cookie. Because I really loved him, I didn’t want Nazmi to hit his head on the cement and cry. I really did love him. But I feared for the boxes. I couldn’t show him my love because I feared for the boxes. Because Nazmi didn’t only get attached to people quickly, but also their things.

  * * *

  One Tuesday evening, I put all the small wooden boxes in my bag. I climbed up to the roof of the building. The sky was clear and smooth. I smiled, saying to myself, There’s no mucus tonight. We used to consider the clouds a collection of strips of mucus. So I thought: We can choose an endless number of stars so that we can leave some for the next day. I waited for Nazmi. But after many hours, the stars started getting bigger, inflating, swelling up. They became faces. They moved from one side of the sky to the other. I was no longer able to follow how they flowed through the sky. They used to bump into each other like marbles. Giant marbles. And they emitted terrible sounds. They split open the edge of the roof and the flimsy aluminum antennas, which we used to bend on purpose as revenge against the neighbors who treated Nazmi badly when he delivered gas canisters to them. Indeed, even the Ferris wheel at the amusement park started shaking to the right and left like a giant coin. It was lit up. But I didn’t leave. I opened the bag and looked at the boxes. Then I looked again at the stars. I measured them. Lengthwise and then crosswise. From where I was standing on the rooftop. I only used two fingers. That was the latest method I’d discovered to measure the size of the stars.