Beirut Noir

by Iman Humaydan

  Dusty, gray, and sticky, like that oily layer on the skin of my Party journalist friend’s face, moments from those Beirut days at the beginning of the war are present in my memory now. I used to figure that the day’s hot, mucous-like stickiness would only soil me as a curious spectator. That stickiness would be kneaded in things and objects, like vomit, as if it were its original material. As if it were a coagulated substance in the bodies of humans and their relationships, meetings, words, and voices; in streets, places, and houses at all times. While they slept and when they woke up late in the morning, a magnetized tinfoil fog would stain the city’s low-hanging sky. They would walk on the ground with heavy aborted footsteps, as if they were battling through a womb’s serum mixed with urine and dirt on the asphalt on sticky days, and nights when opaque, scarce lights resembled a carbon fog on faces . . . I moved through these moments with my journalist friend, as if she were my blind guide born of the womb of that world, as if I were a guide for her slow emergence onto its shores.

  Was I truly a spectator standing on the shores of this world that Beirut drowned in years before I left it? Were there even shores over there? I don’t know.

  * * *

  I didn’t step into the small, glass shower stall. Naked, walking barefoot in the corridor to my bedroom, the feel of the threads of the small silk rug in front of my wardrobe sent soft tremors from my feet to the edges of my naked body. With my own eyes I glimpsed the anonymous person, the narrator of imaginary scenes of my life, my nakedness illuminated by the dusty light emanating from two old lamps covering the glass of two small wooden bedside tables. The dusty light behind me drowned things in the room in still, concealed shadows and I imagined the light intimate and pale on my naked back. I passed the palm of my hand ever so slowly over the small dark-blond freckles on my shoulders. All of the men whom I’ve gotten naked for have rubbed their lips on these freckles that the Beiruti-Baalbaki painter once told me were stars extinguished on my skin. He was the only one of my men in Beirut who I’d responded to, agreeing to be—though I was fifteen years younger than him—an extramarital lover who didn’t ask him one question about it.

  I reach my hand out to open the drawer of my wardrobe and I suddenly realize that it’s this painter who is the one now inspiring me to remember the scenes of my life. Months ago, I learned that he’d died in Beirut. I push my hands between my clothes hanging in the wardrobe. The mild, refreshing cold—my neglected clothes cool in their sleepy, intimate neutrality—slinks from a long black dress onto my hands and skin, so I take it out, unfold it, and hug it to my chest. Its soft cloth revitalizes my breasts while hanging on my naked body all the way down to my legs. Here in this very room, I’d put it on fifteen years earlier, and was overwhelmed by my breasts, back, and naked arms reflected in the mirror. So I’d put on a black sweater and went to my mother’s funeral. And isn’t this also the same dress I’d worn in my role as a “lady of the night” on my rendezvous with my Kurdish poet in Beirut?

  Is this one of the many dresses that my colleague and only friend from the art institute left at my parents’ house when I let her stay with us, after my sister Vera left for Paris?

  The institute was a residential building on a small hill near the Raouché coast and its famous rock. After being the only female teacher at the institute where all the other professors were men, I met my friend after the administration contracted her to teach lessons missing from the full-time professors’ schedules. During the first five years of the war, the female teachers all immigrated or retired—one after the other—until not one other remained in the institute.

  Years before I started teaching I heard stories from my artist and journalist friends about the institute in the time before the war, all of which centered around its professors who had once been students there. From the strands of these stories, I concluded that they were men from modest backgrounds and families, new to the city, who in their school years had mixed with female students of urban families who could afford luxury. These young women would enroll in the institute for a period of time, and their liberation would take on an affected character. They paraded beauty, the feminine body, and its elegant fashions in the theaters of public daily life. In the time before the war, the institute was one of these theaters. It mixed liberation, the glitter of art, and the fashion parade—and this made its students stars who diffused their glamorous, intoxicating brilliance out of the reach of the eyes and imaginations of the male students of more modest backgrounds. These men were obsessed, infatuated, and crushed by their female colleagues’ charms—for example, their burning love and infatuation with the girls working in beauty salons and clothing shops, imitating the cinema and singing stars of the 1960s. But what truly surprised me was that in the stories of their burning passion for their female colleagues, the former-student teachers would identify them by their family names, saying that this one or that one was a girl from one family or another, as though they were announcing the brand names of luxury goods. I found it strange that this or that narrator would say that he had forgotten the name of his female colleague, a student whom he had been obsessed with and blindly subservient to for a year or two or three . . . He’d sat with her in classrooms, drawing studios, the institute cafeteria, and the city’s coffeehouses. I surmised that the young women of the stories were nothing but reflections of their notable families’ lives of luxury and affluence in the eyes and imaginations of young men hungry for lives of luxury and affluence. They didn’t touch those girls except when they were alone daydreaming and masturbating. I said that once, giggling loudly, during a session where which some of the institute’s male teachers were telling these old stories, shortly after I had started teaching just at the end of the first years of the war, 1975 and 1976.

  At that time, academic life in the institute—teachers’ meetings, relationships, and daily get-togethers—had started to become colored by creeping rivalry, discord, and rumors circulating among the professors and students who belonged to political parties and armed groups fighting in the streets. A few days after I began teaching—and I didn’t want to do this, but I reluctantly submitted my request to the institute administration for contractual teaching hours, my answer to the insistence of the leader of the Communist Party’s intellectual cell—I heard that my request would have been denied were it not for the intervention of the party leadership and its pressure on the administration. At first I was the only female teacher, so the presence of another woman in the institute delighted me—from the moment I saw her in a long black dress, with slits up the side and revealing the top of her chest. Soon, my initial, fleeting encounters with her alerted me to the need of having any woman at my side in this sexist place. Days after this female colleague started teaching, rumors started to spread around the male professors that she was the lover of a failed lawyer from a modest background, who had risen through the ranks of an armed group to help to establish both it and its leader who had been a cleric before his disappearance three years after the beginning of the war.

  When she told me during our second meeting that she’d spent years in Paris studying drawing and sculpture, I didn’t believe her. Nor did I believe her tale about her prosperous family who owned land and orchards in Sour. Nor that armed Communists blew up their abandoned mansion after they’d fled to Paris. She used to come to the institute as though she were being forced there. I then bumped into her several times stepping out of or into her fancy car, which made me want to flee, feeling an aversion to her slow, swaying, stylish way of walking in evening dresses which she wore even when teaching. Then I started thinking that her skin, under the flashy cloth of her dresses, exuded a stickiness like the saliva that dripped from the mouths of the male teachers whenever they saw her. Their lecherous saliva would be smeared on the ground around her feet and these sticky smears would pile up on top of others that had been left on the tiles long before. So, whenever I ran into my only female colleague, I’d quickly move away as though I smelled a terrible odor before
she even stopped to initiate a conversation.

  But a captivating smell wafted from her body and her car when we escaped to my parents’ house on the day two bombs exploded on a street near the institute. On the steps in the middle of a crowd of students, I heard her angry and trembling voice behind me, calling me to wait for her. She clung to my arm and asked me not to leave her to drive her car through the streets all alone. As soon as we had walked two or three steps into the crowd, she turned around quickly, shouting, “Institute full of animals, I hope you all die! Go back to your mosques, a curse on your fathers, you dogs!” Then I saw her slap a young bearded man behind us. I dragged her by her arm down the stairs, and she told me in a low voice trembling with rage that he’d forced his hand between her thighs. At the entrance to the institute she dug her fingers into my arm and I hugged her to calm her anger. That alluring scent wafted into my nose and I heard applause all around us, only then realizing that the students were enjoying the sight of us hugging each other. We entered her car, not far from the institute’s gate, just a little before nightfall. Sitting behind the steering wheel, she said that after today she’d never return to this house of vice. I was struck by her bold, violent movement, hitching her black dress up to the top of her thighs before quickly launching the car in a way that scared me more than the loud blast of the explosion I’d just heard. She turned toward me, saying that he—that bearded young man—hurt her with his violent grabbing of her underpants and almost ripped them from under her dress.

  The streets of Beirut were thunderstruck by a sudden fear, haunted by passing ghosts who disappeared as fugitives a few moments before. Its asphalt seemed somber, vibrating like metal under the screeching of our speeding car’s tires, a long, extended thrust into the terrifying daytime silence. As far as I could see, a spectacle of buildings almost devoured us, declining and drifting away, as though they were collapsing in silence and vanishing behind us. Suddenly, my driver closed the car window and burst out screaming. She careened forward, reeling between the two sides of the street before crashing a front wheel against the curb. A new explosion stopped my friend’s hysterical screaming, causing her to hunch over the steering wheel, which she hugged with her arms. When she lifted her head after a few moments, I told her that my parents’ house was nearby and we could go spend the night there.

  * * *

  In the dark light of my room, in front of the mirror on my wardrobe, I put the long black dress forgotten in my closet since my mother’s funeral on my naked body. A clear, sudden flash of that captivating fragrance blows over my senses, and blurry images of my colleague and I in my parents’ house in Beirut are reflected in my imagination. In a large mirror on the walls of my room in the old house, a vision of my colleague removing her long black dress, then putting on one of my housedresses. My skin shivers tautly under the cloth of my dress, and I lift it off my thighs and pass two strange hands over them, as if I’m passing them over my colleague’s thighs. Like a phantom from drawings I sketched during my innocent isolation in my Beirut adolescence, departing her body, her cold skin revealing thin, symmetrical bones. Irritation from my old housedress on that skinny body snuck onto my skin, on the days when I drew myself all naked and stretched out on the white sheets of my bed. I approached the mirror on my wardrobe, eyes closed. I kissed myself on the lips and listened to the echoes of my lust-filled gasps for air, from which a remote voice pronounces my name.

  I try in vain to remember my colleague’s name. Its letters are scattered, remote, and don’t come together on my tongue. This smooth gap in my memory pulls me backward and makes me take a few steps away from the mirror on my wardrobe; I notice in its depths a blurry vision of our naked embrace. The taste of her scent in my mouth. I take the straps of my dress off my shoulders, and its cloth slowly falls from my chest and bends over at the top of my round butt. It’s as if my hands, without me, touched the pleats of the cloth, pushing it to the ground so that it piled up around my feet. Two moist lips kiss my belly button, and I bend down to embrace the woman’s head, my fingers playing with her short, boyish hair. With two thin arms she hugs my thighs and she passes her rough tongue, anointed with saliva, slowly over my skin. I’m intoxicated all the way to the roots of the hair growing out of my head. I open my eyes and hear myself repeating my colleague’s name. Cold little drops of sweat drip from under my arm, and from the strip of kisses between my breasts they descend toward my side. I bend down, pick up my dress from the floor, and a dizziness burns in me.

  The light is strong on the surface of the mirror around my body. Suddenly, I remember the face of my friend and colleague and her rosy, puffy cheeks, a colored hijab tied tight around her hair, the top of her forehead, and her neck presenting itself as a stranger to her body and self. I remember her in a scene that took place in front of a mirror in my parents’ house, practicing with laughter to put on the hijab and tie its edges around her face, while informing me that the director of the art institute had spoken to her about wearing it and his desire to marry her secretly. They’d be married by a shaykh he knew, rent an apartment in Beirut for their secret life, and he’d appoint her a full-time professor at the institute.

  Before this, when he first approached her, we spent evenings at my parents’ house laughing and talking about him and his behavior. She told me that once she took him out in her car on Beirut’s seaside Corniche, and with his outstretched hand and thick, short, trembling fingers he started skimming and touching the cloth of her dress. The image of a man’s hand creeping up toward a woman’s thigh under the cloth of her dress in a car aroused me, and I asked my friend what she did at that moment. She told me that she turned to her side and saw an impassive bald head, belonging to a man who’d let his blind, detached hand approach her dress and leg, both of which she felt were detached from her. The idea of a blind hand and its movement detached from a man’s body, together with a bald head stationary like a stone sculpture, with its suppressed, fearful desires, suggested to me that I had found the necessary shades and features to complete the canvas that I had started painting.

  In that vast living room with its high ceiling, I turned to my friend who was stretched out on an old sofa. I loved the sight of her in an open bathrobe, revealing her long, thin legs. I came close to her, started running my hand slowly over the blond fluff of her legs, and felt a slight trembling in her skin, a little rough to the touch under my hand. She didn’t turn to me and she didn’t look at my hand. It was as if she were submitting to a distraction that completely detached her from her body and her presence at my side. To bring her back from her reverie, I observed that the toupee on the director’s head would take fifteen years off of his life—that was the age difference between the two of them—and that her secret marriage to him would add fifteen years to her life, so they would be the same and could produce secret children.

  My friend laughed and got up from the chaise longue, saying, “All male children, I will bear twins after twins, and not like the four female children that his cousin my co-wife bore for him in his village in the south where they live in his parents’ house.” I was hearing the word co-wife for the first time and I imagined an old blind woman in a painting of the Greek countryside.

  But I followed my friend’s words and thoughts, telling her, “You’ll visit her there and help her go on a diet. With his fake hair and marriage to you, the director will rekindle his desire for her and not divorce her. He might also regain his Communist commitment from the days when he was a school teacher in the village, before he left the Party and travelled to France to get a doctorate in philosophy, which led to his appointment as director of the Art Institute.”

  After a while my friend told me that she invited him to dinner at a seaside restaurant and he told her that in his doctoral dissertation he had analyzed manifestations of the Nietzschean philosophy of power in the personality in Imam Ali ibn Abi Talib’s book Nahj al-Balagha, or The Way of Eloquence, and in Imam Khomeini’s school of Islam. After the two of them had
left the restaurant, my friend continued, he dared to put his hand on her thigh where her dress was pulled back, as she was driving the car. I laughed, telling her that he was remembering the revolution of power in his dissertation, but just as quickly she shouted, “No, no . . . he wasn’t remembering anything!” Then she laughed, saying that he asked her to end her relationship with me because I was an Armenian slut. Suddenly, I begged her to bring him to my place one evening. She liked the idea and I realized that she—with no explanation—had already intuited what I was thinking. We would agree on the nature of the evening and its purpose, even down to the implications of her conditions—that she would leave us alone at home, the director and me, and she would depart at the end of the night.

  Months had passed with her staying with me at my parents’ house. On the evening of the invitation, I intentionally put on a long sky-blue dress whose thin cloth revealed my body’s curves. When I opened the door to them, I swallowed laughter upon seeing a pile of jet-black hair on the director’s head. I welcomed them and brought them into the living room, congratulating the director on his new hair, but I surprised him and myself by saying to him, with a smile, that his baldness used to entice me. He stared silently at my face for a moment before moving his gaze onto my body and stabilizing it at the tops of my thighs, and I asked him if he liked my dress. My friend answered that the dress—her dress—was more beautiful on my body than her body, saying to the director, “Look, look, isn’t she just like Mary Magdalene—why don’t we use her as a drawing model at the institute?” Then she turned on the large crystal chandelier hanging from the high ceiling, and the lights of its many lamps were diffused throughout the expansive living room. I wanted to say that women’s bodies seem bald when they are free of clothes, but I turned quickly toward the door of my room, explaining that I would change the dress I was wearing for another one. The director mentioned that we were alone in the house, that no one among us was a stranger, and that his wife wore a red dress like mine after she went into the hotel room and took off her white wedding gown. I nodded and headed toward a seat in the living room. But I quickly stopped, since a new scene suddenly loomed in my imagination: the director on a bed in a hotel room, tearing a see-through red dress off the body of a woman. It then occurred to me that I was the woman whose dress was ripped off on the bed, here in my room, after my friend had left at the end of the evening.