Beirut Noir

by Iman Humaydan

  “Then think of her as one of the young women who you brought to him and forget the whole thing.”

  “She left her fiancé for him . . . Who does she think he is? I’ve only just agreed to marry him.”

  “It’s good that he’s no longer entitled to anything. Why did you want to know about his affairs in the first place?”

  “Tonight I’m going to meet that filmmaker who liked my movie—and I think he also likes me.”

  “But you’re half-paralyzed, you can hardly stand up.”

  “I’ll stay at your place, Lamia—and tell the filmmaker to bring me back there. You have to take me to pick up my daughter from the nursery . . . You know, Lamia, I’m losing my strength. I’m sad when I think about how much I’ve chased love. All of this effort, in vain. He doesn’t even ask how I’m doing! My failure is massive. I’ve forgotten how to laugh. I’ve lost the joy of living, the pleasure of feeling the ground underneath my feet. I imagine him with his whole body curved around her, staring at her mad with love, with me sitting in front of them. This is terrorism, this is a direct assault on my being.”

  “I can’t believe what I’m hearing . . . You, Salma, who are so—”

  “Sometimes I think about calling the two of you—you and Hyam—asking you to send me flowers or candy or fruit so I can feel some kind of warmth. Lamia, you want the truth? I think your failure means nothing compared to mine. Every day I feel the same way you did that evening when it became clear that everything would end between you and Philippe.”

  “You still remember that evening?”

  “Now even more than ever. Your only concern was preparing Philippe’s pizza. You didn’t pay much attention when I told you about my kidnapping by the party’s ‘comrades.’ We didn’t know that on that very evening we would do brave and fearless deeds in battle with members of the Other Party! Yes, we swept away passion and weapons in one fell swoop that night, and we were careless.”

  Despite her pain, Salma burst out laughing and said, “By day, the machine gun was waiting for me and by evening you were waiting for Philippe while your mad admirer Samir was waiting for him with his gun. A group of armed fighters surrounded Philippe at the entrance to the building. You started pacing around like a madwoman, asking me, Why is he late? I don’t know what inspired me to go out and see what was happening on the street. I found Samir in front of the building in a military uniform. He turned toward me and said, Tell your girlfriend I won’t let him enter this building and he won’t be able to cross this street, no matter how quick he is. I told him that were he to return it would be his last stand. I instructed my guys to follow him home and watch his every move. Then he added, Tell your girlfriend that it is she alone who is able to keep this bad seed away from all of us. Tell her that my situation in life has improved and that I’ve been in love with her since high school. He doesn’t love her. I responded, Why don’t you come yourself, Samir, and let her know all these things? But he didn’t dare climb the stairs to our place, despite all the influence he claimed to have.”

  “Yes, calls and threats were enough for Philippe to be humiliated like this in front of my house . . . and the man with bullets and influence to meddle in my life . . .”

  “I cannot forget your face or how you looked on that night, your back hunched over all of a sudden. We tried to intercede with someone in the party who had more influence than Samir . . . We went to him in the morning and we felt reassured when we saw him, because he was an older man. But he started to scoff at everything that you were saying. My girl, you are pursuing an already lost cause. He’s not for you. My God, he started admonishing us so we’d understand that we were all under close surveillance. And we went back the way we came, like this, defeated. I knew that the season of your sadness would begin when the ‘joy’ of Philippe’s marriage to someone else became a reality.”

  “Come on, let’s stop worrying about this and live our lives.”

  “Lamia, I’m living a failure like yours right now, but I’m thinking about getting out of it, whereas you didn’t want to leave it behind. You needed a house, not university, not friends, not family; you found a thousand pretexts to not see anyone. How stupid you were!”

  * * *

  In any case, pretty soon she won’t be stupid anymore. She’ll marry Farid and turn a new page in her life.

  She put the pictures back in the drawer and went into the living room. She opened the window and leaned against it. The roar of the powerful electric generators reached her. This feeling of exhaustion returned: an exhaustion of bygone years, a delicious exhaustion which gripped her when Mousa, Philippe’s friend, came for an unexpected visit. She started to feel her sadness passionately because he came to offer her comfort. She sat on the sofa, listening to his pleasant words, stealing looks at his childlike hands and his sturdy neck.

  She recalled the day when the three of them—Lamia and Philippe and Mousa—were together and Mousa offered his hand to help her cross over a pool of water, then he turned toward Lamia and said, practically in a whisper, “I can see that the two of you will no longer be together, from now on.”

  A painful sweetness emanated from him. He started showering her with calls in the afternoon and their conversations would stretch out long into the evening. She left the cover of the sofa where he’d been sitting crumpled up in the same position for days. It made her happy to think about his presence there in front of her as permanent. She’d sip what remained in his cup, after he left, as though it were a kiss. Once, she was standing in front of the window and he called to her from the stairs, smiling. His smile made her understand that she’d replaced one love with another. If only she were able to delete those evenings from all the memories of her life, when she’d lean out the window and see his broad feet climbing the stairs to visit her without warning. He’d sit on the sofa and start laughing his sweet laugh, continuing his story about Prince Myshkin. His fluttering eyelids melted her. Each flutter was some kind of colorful bird that she’d approach only to have it fly off, away from her, to parts unknown.

  What was it in his voice that made her loneliness dissipate, bringing joy to her heart and removing it from its labyrinth? His gentleness entranced her in the beginning. Then ever so slowly he started assailing her with dark thunderbolts. What did he want from her? Nothing, he told her, adding that he didn’t get involved in the lives of women who he has affairs with. Sometimes he’d call her and ask her strange questions, like the number of times her ex-lover had sex with her. Why did he even care about that? His questions perplexed her: What did he want? For her to announce her love for him? Would that be enough? Did he want an intimate friendship? She awoke from her daydreams panicked by the ringing telephone. Farid’s voice surprised her, drowning her thoughts of Mousa, “Darling, I’ll be a little late.”

  She opened one of the unsent letters to Mousa she had kept, as though to complement the miserable pleasures that her life kept from her.

  You don’t want to influence the lives of the women who you have affairs with? That’s fine. This sentence is enough for me to not want to see your face again. You know something? I turned that sentence over in my head thousands of times and didn’t consider asking you what you really meant by it. You don’t know the dark thoughts that invaded me and made me dead inside. As soon as I would try to get close to you, you’d let me know that there wasn’t any benefit for me in being in your life, freely offering hints, marked by pain, almost as though you were completing the thought to yourself: Or in anyone’s life.

  Should I have endured your dark thunderbolts, vagueness, and forgetfulness?

  Did I learn anything else from you? Are you truly able to leave me in peace?

  I feel like a sad, raging bull, ready to fight, but the stabs it’s receiving on all sides have made it feel hollow.

  I feel truly exhausted. Nothingness is the most exhausting thing.

  She put the letter in an envelope. She decided to finally send it by post. She passed her tongue over the s
ticky line. It tasted bitter. No, she won’t send it. If only Salma were here to take care of this. She’d know how to, like she used to do in the past.

  “Salma, why did you throw away all the letters I wrote to Philippe?”

  “Because I believed this was the only way to avenge you.”

  “But you made me believe that he had no feelings . . .”

  “And he doesn’t . . . My husband has no feelings either. I’m going to arrange another meeting with that film producer.”

  “I won’t destroy myself like you did. It’ll be an open marriage like we agreed it would be: step by step.”

  “But won’t you wait a little bit until you can stand on your own two feet?”

  “I won’t wait. This isn’t the first time he’s betrayed me with random women whom he’s found along the way. Carrying on like this you’re harming your children.”

  “Spare me the sermon. Even you, Lamia, didn’t you say that you would’ve loved Philippe until the end of time, that you would’ve waited for him for a hundred years? Even after he sold you out for the cheapest possible price?”

  “But he didn’t sell me out. He had to pull back because Crazy Samir the militiaman would’ve killed him. Samir sent me a letter that said, If you open your door to him one more time, I’ll push him right through the gates of hell.”

  “You know what? Today I can’t even believe this whole story . . . How did Samir know that Philippe had been coming over to your place?”

  “He was definitely spying on the house.”

  “So he would spend all day and night guarding the entrances to the street? Who knows, perhaps a mutual friend told Samir what time your dear beloved would come. Believe me . . . there was a mutual friend. Perhaps Philippe was happy about this development and seized the opportunity to flee, using the party thugs as an excuse—something beyond his own desire or free will.”

  “But who was restraining him? Holding his freedom hostage? Who was blocking him?”

  “You portrayed him as an exemplary person, tormented and honest, you only ever spoke about his sincerity. He didn’t remain sincere, though. Why didn’t he stand up for you?”

  “With those murderous beasts after him?”

  “They only wanted to frighten him . . .”

  “He had a right to be scared—I would have done the same thing had I been in his position . . . He is free!”

  “Of course he’s free, but the problem is that he shackled you with your feelings . . . He didn’t end things there but instead distorted your view of life and men. This shriveled you up—you! Someone who had been full of life and brimming with confidence. You started your life with the wrong person and this ruined everything.”

  “And you . . . ? Aren’t you doing the same as I did? Then surely what you’re saying isn’t true, and at least I knew love.”

  “In my opinion, all you knew was stubbornness, sadness, and loneliness that got you nowhere . . . Yes, he was very sincere! The whole time you used to talk to us about how he didn’t want to be tied down to any one woman, and then, all of a sudden, he was engaged. Then he got married with everyone there watching—all of his friends and ours too . . . He’s worse than my husband, taking everything he could and not giving anything at all. After all these years, I charge him with having planned this all with a mutual friend of his and Samir’s, encouraging Samir to threaten him so he could run away like the wind.”

  “Could someone really plan to act so despicably? What are you ranting on about? It seems to me that your husband’s cheating has made you delirious!”

  “But with clear vision. Never make justifications—of any kind—for a man. And Philippe’s the one being charged here.”

  “Wow, the girl’s gone mad!”

  “No, I’m not mad. Only I can no longer trust anyone, not even you, who deluded us into believing you were unique, suffering, tortured—but no more than two years had passed when . . . Didn’t you fall in love with his friend Mousa? Did you think I didn’t know? Why didn’t you try to marry him?”

  “Who told you that he wanted to get married?”

  “Your egotistical beloved made it seem as though you weren’t suited to marriage and you believed him, you believed the lie. You constantly compared him to Philippe and that’s how you distorted your relationship with Mousa for no reason. After this, you did the worst thing. You fell in love with a married man!”

  “But I don’t know his wife!”

  “What’s the difference?”

  * * *

  The doorbell rang. She awoke in a panic, not only because of the ringing but because Farid had arrived before she’d prepared anything for dinner.

  Farid was there in front of her, with his big, sparkling eyes. He engulfed her in his arms and his scent filled her nose: this strange mixture of expensive cologne and washing powder wasn’t familiar to her . . . She found the scent pleasant, perhaps because it wasn’t like other scents she knew. The cologne seemed like a disinfectant. Then he put his hand on her backside, forcefully, lifting up her buttocks.

  “How I love a woman’s full bum!”

  She started to laugh vibrantly and was secretly happy because he’d praised her butt.

  “Do you know, Lamia, I love you for your happiness? When you were small, you were so joyful. I would watch you bite into an apple as though it were the last apple on earth. Do you still eat them like that?”

  “Like what?”

  “You used to plunge your teeth into an apple and bite into its core, sucking out its juices voraciously. Hearing that sound from far away would make me salivate. So many times, I’d bite into an apple trying to imitate you and not succeed. This made a big impression on me. Could you eat one right now just for me?”

  She started to laugh. “I didn’t know you were paying attention to what I was doing.”

  “I remember another time: You’d finished cleaning the porch and you were sitting on the stairs in the shade to cool off. Then you brought a plate of apricots and put them down in front of you on a little stool. The colors of the apricot stones were reflected in your skin. Then your female cousins came, Salma was one of them. They sat down and ate apricots and gossiped. I used to gaze at all of them and wonder which of you was the prettiest. I used to feel that you all had one face that was repeated over and over.”

  She felt like he was talking about another woman. Had she really been that happy? She took pleasure in this image of a young woman surrounded by a bevy of other young women who resemble her. As if she were a memory of a paradise lost. Yes, Farid will take me far away and he’ll help me. He’ll be busy with his scientific research and I’ll be busy with my children. I’ll discover a new continent; I’ll be in his big house in Sydney, far away from all this muck.

  She saw white sails in tranquil, sparkling harbors, as though they were an extension of a road that continues when asphalt turns into water.

  “It’s my luck that you didn’t marry. I’ve wanted a woman like you in my life for so long. Happy and strong. Perhaps you were satisfied when I came to you the first time. You didn’t even visit me or pick me up at the airport. I’m the one who took the initiative and came to visit you all. You were unfazed by my visit and remained distant, standing on guard. You are still as proud as you were as an adolescent and perhaps even more so.”

  “It seems I still have high expectations,” she said. “Your pride frightened me.”

  “How did you manage to put aside fear and find the courage to encroach upon my world once again? I thought you’d arrived at this age without marrying because of your pride. You know that as a woman advances in age, there is no longer a justification for these high expectations.”

  She sighed deeply. She looked at the open suitcases in front of her with her carefully ironed and folded clothes inside them.

  “You’ll have to excuse me; I haven’t found time to prepare dinner yet . . .”

  “Don’t worry about it. Let’s go to a restaurant around here.”

  “Should
we go to a Lebanese place?”

  “Doesn’t matter . . . In Sydney, we’re used to all kinds of cuisines . . . We should settle the wedding formalities and leave right away. If you could see Sydney, if you could see the harbor, the beauty of the sails. I don’t know how people can bear to live here.”

  “You should give it a little time . . . But wasn’t Beirut worse on your first visit? You came during the height of the war—it was destroyed, dead, soulless.”

  “I don’t feel any change. Maybe because I blocked this out. Now, before we marry and leave the country, we should discuss the most important thing: I have two daughters. As you know, their mother left them because she wasn’t able to look after them and I wouldn’t allow them to live with her. Will you agree to have them live with us, or should I have them stay with their mother?”

  “Where’s the problem? Of course I want them to live with us.”

  “I know you are an understanding and good person.”

  “This is how I’ll build my family . . . I’m still young enough that I might be able to have a couple of children . . .”

  Faced with Lamia’s enthusiasm, Farid started biting his lips. “This is the only point that we really have to discuss. I don’t want more children. I’ve suffered a lot. I can’t stand to have another child in my life.”

  Why did he not care about her opinion? Who was she to him? Did he want to withhold the one dream that she still had left? Seeing the face of a child, holding it close to her chest, inhaling its fragrance and kissing its toes, one by one.

  Lamia went into the bedroom to change her clothes, with Farid following.

  “Lamia, what’s wrong? Can I come in? Your face is pale . . . What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing, my head hurts a bit . . . Tomorrow we can go to a restaurant . . . or the day after tomorrow . . . I have a headache and I want to be alone.”

  She took off her clothes, sadly calm. She no longer wanted anything. Now all her dreams have come to nothing: the miniature white sails slipped away with the road and remained suspended in the harbor; the hand of the little boy and his tiny red sweater have disappeared far away, behind her eyes shrouded in tears. He no longer brings her little bunches of flowers or puts paper sailboats in the pool in front of their house.