Leaving Beirut

by Ghoussoub, Mai;

  At school nobody ever suggested that the opinions of one’s neighbours might be a value reference. For some of us the dichotomy between what we were taught in the French lycée and the reality of our home surroundings was somehow schizophrenic; for others it was a good source of maturity and investigative thinking. Mind you, a mild form of schizophrenia operated in the school itself. Certain of the teachers still set up systems whereby one of the students would inform on others (this was so that the teachers could leave the class in silence for a while if they had to take care of other business). The teacher appointed one of the students to be responsible for discipline. The student would go to the blackboard and write down the names of fellow students who were talking or misbehaving. Other teachers would have despised any student who told on others and often spoke of solidarity as a prime matter of honour. It is easy, at first sight, to condemn a student who causes the punishment of his fellow classmates. Most decent, enlightened parents would tend that way. But ask these same liberal-minded parents if they would want their children to tell on a fellow schoolmate who was walking around promoting drugs and you will find that in the rare cases when the answer is not positive, it will be hesitant and much less readily forthcoming.

  Tell a half smart, modern-educated city person that they are virtuous and honourable and they will think that you see them as some kind of fake, or a poser, or a relic from the past. Obviously I am exaggerating, but honour is suspect in this age of psychotherapy and coexistence. The comforting phrases: We may be poor, but at least can be proud of our reputation … We are poor but we are clean … We are poor but we never harmed anybody … We may be poor, but our name knows no blemish … are less and less convincing. The concern about establishing dignity and justice is an unclear and convoluted business in what we call our ‘Big Village’.

  Is this the ambiguity that lies at the root of our fascination with the Mafia and its codes of honour? Why do we watch The Godfather films again and again? Not merely for the exoticism and colour of the frightening and exciting underworld that they portray. We watch them because it is easy to fall into the convincing, self-sealed and harmonious values of honour and revenge that these ‘Men of Their Words’ have set for themselves. And we are constantly reminded that such rigidly demanding codes of honour cannot function without an accompanying and overwhelming set of betrayals. We know this about life, but here it is blown up into a larger dimension, and the blood flows more freely than usual.

  The Revenge of Leila’s Grandmother

  Do you remember Leila, Mme Nomy? She was the happy, talkative girl who shared my desk. The girl that I had chosen as my best friend with the enthusiasm that only little girls know. She understood better than I did your anger over my little story.

  Leila’s grandmother was not like other grandmothers. She was much thinner and more imposing than other grandmothers I had seen. She never treated Leila’s friends to nice cakes, folk stories or generous, loving smiles. The older we grew the thinner she became, and the longer her neck seemed. She held her neck as you hold a stick in front of you, always tilted slightly forward. She rarely said a nice word to any of us, and when she did, we were never sure, Leila and I, that she really meant to be pleasant. Her name was Fadwa. She was an erect, nervous presence who filled me with confusion and unease, for I had not been told that this was how some grandmothers could be.

  I will never forget Leila’s grandma. She created confusion in my youthful naivety, and it was only when I met Leila again, in London, in my late thirties, that I understood this perennially bony, taut and elongated woman. She was a woman who fed on anger, and she drew her energies from an insatiable need for revenge. Her husband had betrayed her in the early years of their marriage, and she could never forgive him the humiliation. After her grandmother’s death, Leila told me the story of this woman whom we had so hated and feared. She spoke about her with a newly-felt compassion and even some humour.

  Fadwa was born at the turn of the century. Nobody really knew the exact date. When identity cards were introduced in Lebanon she was already a teenager, a fact that made her insist, throughout her life that the registration office had made her a few years older than she really was. She often told Leila how beautiful she had been in her youth. Then she would pause and wait for her granddaughter’s inevitable response: ‘But you are still a beautiful woman, Grandma.’ Up there in the mountains, above the Bekaa Valley, the First World War was experienced mainly through the hunger and the misery that it brought to the peasants. ‘But we never lacked anything in our family,’ Fadwa insisted. ‘While everyone around us was starving, we had plenty of grain in our attic, whole jars of olive oil, and soaps and perfumed incense. We were a cut above the average villager.’

  So Fadwa believed, or liked to believe, for in 1916, when she was still an adolescent, her parents shipped her off on a boat to Ghana, where she was to meet her new husband, Salem, an earlier immigrant who had a business there and whom she had not met previously. It was a fate no different from that of many other girls of her time. In order to save them from hunger the parents located a family with an immigrant son, with whom they arranged their daughter’s marriage. In fact Fadwa thought she was going to America, for that was what people called Africa in her village. The reason for this geographical confusion was simple. People in the villages would pay a boat owner a certain sum of money to take their children to America, which was supposed to be the land of wealth and opportunities. The ship owner would disembark his ignorant passengers on any shore that happened to suit him, telling them: ‘Here you are. This is America.’

  This was how Fadwa’s future husband had ended up in Ghana. There he had opened a shop, in which he sold bananas as well as costume jewellery, medicines, tinned sardines and cosmetic creams that promised an eternally youthful complexion. He needed a wife who would give him a home and a family and, most importantly, recreate for him a bit of the Lebanese village that he had left behind and for which he still deeply longed.

  Before sending her off alone on the boat, Fadwa’s mother had told her over and over again that she should watch out for men en route. There were too many stories of lives that had been destroyed because of young girls making silly mistakes during these lonely journeys. The honour of the family, who had given their word to Salem’s family, was at stake. ‘You are the most beautiful girl among these hungry peasants,’ her mother told her repeatedly before her departure. ‘We fed you well. You are going to marry this Salem. Be a good wife to him, but never forget that our family is far superior to his. Before he opened his shop in America his parents never even had one full jar of oil in their attic. Let him know, and let everybody know, that he is about to marry a girl from a home that his family could never even have dreamt of visiting before the war.

  In those days Fadwa was already slim and tall for her age. But her edge was not yet as hard, and her neck was still more elegant than tense. She landed with a large brown cloth bag into which she had packed three dresses, some underwear, a bottle of olive oil and four bags of grain, before tying its four corners in a safe knot which she would use as a handle. The pink dress she was wearing looked fancy to the other peasants, but didn’t impress the crew of the boat, who had seen more recent fashions during their stopovers at the world’s ports.

  Fadwa was full of apprehension before her first meeting with Salem, but her mother’s words had had their effect. She would show him that she had come down in the world in marrying him. Salem tried to be nice, but he had little time for Fadwa’s dreams and not much experience with young women’s expectations either. They married in Africa, which they still called America in their letters to their families back in the village. At first they seemed to get along well. Salem wished that Fadwa would gain some weight. She, for her part, wished that he would dress in different clothes when he left the shop, and act like someone who had married into a better family than the others in the Lebanese community around them. She began to grow a round belly, which had a curiously distended lo
ok as it stretched out from her bony body. Salem often went to the club to play cards after work, while Fadwa went through the pains of nausea and back aches. She went on for many years like that, bearing children and taking care of the little ones. Her opinion was that he ought to worship her for having provided him with this big male family: one girl and five healthy boys, along with only two miscarriages in twelve years. She was convinced that now, since she was the mother of his five boys, and since she was from a far better family than him, Salem would be more than grateful to her. But Fadwa’s repeated pregnancies had had a drastic effect on her body. She was now just an angular shadow of a woman. Instead of making her hips rounder and giving her belly the smooth, fuller contours that most women acquire after childbirth, Fadwa’s body was extending upwards, nervously and tightly, making her look taller and less approachable than ever.

  Dr Day, the British doctor who had opened a clinic in the town almost a year before her last pregnancy, insisted that she should not consider another birth. Fadwa had lived a life of isolation, bound by newborn babies and repeated pregnancies, for as long as she could remember. Salem was grateful, but did not change his manners. Nor did he get round to wearing shoes on Sundays, as she kept asking. Instead he wore sandals which exposed his big tilted toes.

  Fadwa refused to mix with the other Lebanese families in their immigrant community. She didn’t want her children to acquire what she considered to be unsuitable manners. She would have liked to have invited Dr Day and his family round, but he never had time to chat, and his wife never came to the clinic, so Fadwa couldn’t invite the doctor’s children to play with her own. She hadn’t been seeing much of Salem lately. He tended to stay at the club. The more his shop prospered the more help he hired, both for the shop and the house, and the less she saw of him. ‘I had more than ten boys serving me there,’ she would say resentfully, after she returned home hurriedly during the first wave of African nationalism. They left together with many other prosperous merchant families. Back in her village Fadwa would look disdainfully at her only maid. She ordered her around as if it was her fault that she had no cook or serving boys, whatever they’d been called, not like what she’d had in what was, by then, finally known as Africa.

  On the day of their departure, while the slogans and chants of the mass demonstrations could be heard from the dining room, Salem came to tell Fadwa that they all had to leave. They could leave unharmed as long as they left everything behind to make it look as if they were going for a short visit downtown. He would follow the family very shortly and meet them in London. The hotel was already booked. Fadwa didn’t even have time to ask questions. She found herself in the back of a truck, with her children, and the thick wad of money that Salem had told her to hide between her breasts. This was only the beginning of her misery. The truth that she was about to discover a few hours later would hit her in the face like a sharp, humiliating blow. From that moment on, her need for revenge would never be satisfied; it would be the motive behind every movement she made, the source of every thought she could think and the taste of every bit of air she breathed.

  There she was, in the queue at the airport, with all the other Lebanese families, waiting for the first available plane to take them out of the country. She had Walid, her two-year-old, on one arm, and a big plastic bag on the other. As she looked around for her other five children, for fear of losing them in the chaos of the queue, she heard words that fell on her heart like a burning stone. It was the wife of Khalid speaking.

  ‘Salem is not with Fadwa.’

  ‘Obviously not,’ said Amina, whom Fadwa had never liked, and who dared think of herself as higher class than Fadwa herself. ‘He would never leave that woman of his and her daughter behind. He would leave his whole family, to stay with his lover and their daughter. He has no shame about it. Poor Fadwa.’

  POOR FADWA. Those words whirled round the airport and whirled in her ears like a fly caught inside a lampshade. She’d never had a clue, she’d never had the slightest suspicion. Everyone else seemed to know all about it. They must all have gossiped about it with the same disgusting smile that she saw at the corner of Amina’s lips.

  She had no idea how she had landed in London, or how she had arrived at the hotel. The noises of the aircraft and the noises of her demanding children were all mixed in with the buzzing of the words that were spinning in her ears and in her head, and weighing on her chest. Everyone knew about it, everyone except her. These women, whom she would never have condescended to mix with, were holding conversations about her misery. She would rather have died than live to face such an affront.

  Salem was the one responsible for her shame. That sandal-wearing peasant, who should have kissed her feet for all that she had done for him. She thought of the children with whom he had left her alone in this damp, miserable city, and this intimidating hotel. She would not wait for him in London; she would go back to the village and once she got there she would let him know who he really was and who was worth what.

  Salem did in fact come back. A month late, and a few years older. He looked like a broken man. A man who had lost everything he cherished and everything he had worked for. A month is a long time in anybody’s life, and it was more than enough for somebody as hurt as Fadwa to turn their village home into her home. Enough to turn the children into her children, and the main bedroom into a two-bedded room where Salem would feel like an intruder forever after. From the moment he arrived back in the village with his suitcase full of dirty, wrinkled shirts, he became HE for Fadwa. From then on, right up until his death, she would never again pronounce his name, never address him directly. ‘HE is too tired to come out visiting with us,’ she would say. ‘He cannot eat sweet things, they’re bad for him,’ she would declare, as she spirited away the baklava that she knew he adored. If some cousin of his ever came to visit she would make sure that they never came back a second time. She made sure that whenever anyone came to see Salem they realised that they were unwanted, and that they were looked down upon because of their lower social status. Fadwa was never impolite or rude. On the contrary, she always acted like a modest wife and a perfect mother. But people who came to see Salem never came back again. Salem, on the other hand, was never allowed to go out on his own. Either Fadwa would be with him or, if he ever made an independent foray, she would make him pay dearly for it. Anyway, since his return to the village his health seemed to have abandoned him. By now he was more African than Lebanese, and he had not realised that what he was suffering from was his inability to integrate into a country that he had only ever known as a child.

  Salem may have felt estranged in the new setting of his Lebanese home, but Fadwa did not really relax or blossom either. True, she seemed in control, but the effort of it all was tensing her face and making it more severe, her movements were becoming even more angular and her voice was becoming sour and angular too. The children were her children now, and she made sure that she possessed every single movement they made, every single desire they had. What she was really good at was standing between them and their father, making sure that direct contact was either impossible or a source of guilt for them. None of them was ever to marry anyone they desired, or even could have liked. Whenever she felt that one of the boys was drawn to a young, attractive woman she would become restless and find ways to bring ugliness into the situation. Only her daughter ended up marrying the person of her choice. This further embittered Fadwa, but she could live with it, since she knew, as everybody knew, that it is not through daughters that women gain power in this part of the world. The wives of the five sons were chosen for their lack of charm and attractiveness. They were to be pitied for their weakness and lack of influence, and this was precisely what Fadwa wanted.

  Fadwa developed an obsession with cleanliness. She was forever telling the maid to go and wash her hands. She could be seen most of the time scrubbing and dusting and cleaning germs off things. It was hard to tell whether her bony, emaciated hands were hardened from all th
at scrubbing, or whether those sad hands were doing the only thing that her angry eyes could direct them to do – cleaning the dirt that only she could see, and that she believed she had to destroy before it destroyed her. Fadwa would scrub, and as she scrubbed she would look at Salem with loathing. She saw harm in everything he enjoyed. For instance when he sat on the balcony at dusk. ‘He can’t do that … he’ll catch cold,’ she would say, and one of the sons would have to bring his father back into the small sitting room where she kept him penned. If she felt he was enjoying a song on the radio, she would say: ‘He should turn that off. I don’t want that kind of degenerate music in my home.’

  For a further twenty-five years Fadwa shared the same home and slept in the same room as Salem, without ever uttering his name or addressing a word to him, or letting up the onslaught that she had launched against him the day she’d heard those terrible words at the airport. The words swirled unceasingly in her head, with a force that fed her anger and kept her energies constantly renewed. She scrubbed to their rhythm and hated with their force. She moved restlessly all the time, as though she wouldn’t be able to rub away her humiliation if she stayed still.

  Fadwa would not let go. The more miserable Salem looked, the more broken he appeared, the stronger she felt, and the more determined grew her will to punish him. In the last two years before his death, when he was confined to a wheelchair and had lost all taste for life, she took away the only little pleasure he still had: the meals that broke the loneliness of his days, with their long hours of apathy and boredom. Fadwa decided that a good healthy menu was what ‘the old man’, as she had started to call him, needed, in order to live a bit longer. She knew what he most particularly loathed – vegetable and lamb stews. So she restricted his diet to this one item. Leila was once caught and severely punished for having treated him to a piece of chocolate.