Beirut Hellfire Society

by Rawi Hage

  PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF CANADA

  Copyright © 2018 Rawi Hage

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Published in 2018 by Alfred A. Knopf Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto. Distributed in Canada by Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.

  www.penguinrandomhouse.ca

  Alfred A. Knopf Canada and colophon are registered trademarks.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Hage, Rawi, author

  The Beirut Hellfire Society / Rawi Hage.

  Issued in print and electronic formats.

  ISBN 9780735273597

  eBook ISBN 9780735273610

  I. Title.

  PS8615.A355B45 2018  C813’.6  C2018-900210-7

                   C2018-900211-5

  Text and cover design by Lisa Jager

  Cover and interior images: (wave pattern) © StasyStasy, (grit) © Tueris, (skull) © Anselia, all Shutterstock.com

  v5.3.2

  a

  In memory of John Asfour

  Contents

  Cover

  Also by Rawi Hage

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  Beirut, 1978

  Spring

  At the Window

  Three Bombs

  Possessions

  Nadja

  El-Marquis Visits Pavlov

  Antique Dealer

  The Death of Tariq the Dog Owner

  Of Uncles and Cousins

  Jean Yacoub

  Introducing the Lady of the Stairs

  Gunshot

  Summer

  The Priest’s Fragments

  Nadja Again

  Rex

  Gas Bonbons

  Towards the Bombed City

  Nadja Once More

  Mother, Grandmother

  Resurrection

  Rex Again

  Fall

  Society Business

  Madame and Monsieur Fiora

  The Hyena is in Heat

  Watching

  Sex and Death

  Theatre, Dance

  The Hyena Begs

  Acting

  Rex Redux

  Winter

  Dancing

  Family Outing

  Au Revoir?

  Faddoul

  El-Marquis at Home

  Flight

  Happy New Year, Pavlov!

  All Things Change to Fire

  Trojan Horse

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  To lay my dearest brother in the grave.

  —Antigone

  One sunny day at the start of a ceasefire, a father drove with his son down towards where the fighting had been.

  A cadaver had been lying on the ground for days, mutilated. The son, who was named Pavlov, and his father, an undertaker, loaded the remains into plastic bags and carried them to the hearse. The cadaver’s belly had been opened by a bullet wound and vermin had claimed it and multiplied inside the soft organs, gorging on the entrails. Father and son gathered the scattered items that belonged to the dead: a loose shoe, a bag filled with mouldy food, broken glasses.

  Now, the man told his son, you’re sixteen—old enough to become a member of the Society. The Hellfire Society, the father added. He switched on the car radio, and drove towards the coast and then up into the mountains of Lebanon.

  They arrived at a secluded area in the high summit, and finally at a small stone house that looked to be abandoned. But the father picked up a key from under a potted plant, opened the door, and together he and his son entered. The house was simple and humble, cold and damp. Neglect and dust could be seen everywhere. The floor was bare, and through the soles of their shoes father and son felt the touch of leather against grains of dirt and sand. Walking across the room was slippery but manageable—two pairs of feet grinding little particles into the floor. The walls of the house were peeling, exposing straw mixed with clay, an ancient technique for efficient insulation that the villagers had used for centuries. There was a bed in the corner of the main room and, in the middle, a stove with a chimney that extended its charcoal tube towards the ceiling before the cylinder shifted at the end, a perfect ninety degrees, to reach the top of the adjacent wall and cough out its smoke.

  Welcome to the Society’s mansion, the father said.

  Pavlov followed his father into the second room. This was a later addition to the house, separate from the main area. Its cement floor was bare and unpolished and the room’s main feature was a large metal door in the centre of the back wall, with a smaller door beneath the large one. Beside the doors, two large gas tanks were linked by tubes. To Pavlov’s eye, they resembled the garden hoses often seen trailing like serpents around villagers’ houses.

  Eventually we may have to change the pipes, his father said. It’s a simple procedure. You make sure to cut off the gas from its source there—he pointed at a handle embedded in the wall—and before you proceed, lock it firm. Look here, son. You twist this knob on the top in a counter-clockwise motion. Are you cold, son?

  Pavlov nodded.

  In no time this house will burn like hell, his father replied, and smiled. But let’s eat first, and then we’ll bring our unknown soul into the abode of fire, light and eternal warmth.

  They washed their hands with cracked bars of soap under cold water, then roasted chestnuts, heated bread, set out thyme and olive oil and cheese that the father removed from a jar, and drank alcohol. When they were done, they brought the body inside, laid it on a wooden stretcher that the father had made himself and carried the cadaver to the second room. The father opened the metal door and Pavlov saw what looked like a deep, long oven.

  The father turned to the cadaver, and with a singing, wailing voice he uttered these words: They say ashes to ashes, but we say fire begets fire. May your fire join the grand luminosity of the ultimate fire, may your anonymity add to the greatness of the hidden, the truthful and the unknown. You, the father continued, were trapped, lost, ignored, dejected, but now you are found, and we release you back into your original abode. Happy are those rejected by the burial lots of the ignorant. The earth is winter and summer, spring and fall…We heard your call and we came.

  Father and son lifted the bed off the stretcher and slid the cadaver into the stove. The father twisted the knobs of the gas tanks—bonbons he called them—struck a match and lit a fire inside. Then he asked his son to close the furnace door.

  In time, the house became warm. It stood alone in its surroundings, a ball of heat against the chill of the mountains. Pavlov, bewildered by the rituals, sat in silence and listened as his father talked and drank and sang incomprehensible songs that had the rhythms of hymns. Then his father, drunk and tired, stumbled into bed and fell asleep.

  Pavlov stayed awake and gazed at the wooden stove, watching the glow of a few persistent coals coating themselves in grey dust on the outside, burning red and orange at the core. Heat percolated from the second room, so strong it made Pavlov loosen his wool coat and remove his socks and extend his toes. He studied the downcast moustache drawing a line around his father’s open mouth below a triangular Byzantine nose, long and curved, and thin at its tip. Pavlov wondered about the singing, and about the burning of stray corpses, unclaimed and bloated, about orp
haned cadavers and their capacity for music and dance long lost. My father has done this before, alone. What strength, Pavlov thought, what willpower must have been required to lift the heavy bodies and load them into the car. Pavlov examined his father’s shoulders, strong from digging the earth and carrying hardened, blue bodies; and his father’s fingers, infiltrated by dust beneath the nails. From the balcony at home, Pavlov had often seen his father digging, and waving to him when he straightened to stretch his back, and drinking water from the bottle at his side. Tonight’s long, esoteric monologue and affectionate words made Pavlov wonder if his father was addressing him or some other distant son, or if he was simply filled with life and liquor. The incoherent speeches about death, ephemerality, the Iliad’s fallen heroes, and quotes from various saints and philosophers from Heraclitus to Ephrem the Syrian; the disquisitions on ancient burials, fire, and epics from antiquity; and the disdain for the earth, the body…it all made Pavlov wonder if his father might be a madman, a deranged heathen. All these years, he had thought his father’s criticism of the clergy was because the priests meddled in matters of burial grounds and money. Now he realized that his father disliked earthly burials on principle. He preferred fire.

  And then his father woke, and liberating the words inside him, told his son that he dearly wished he could have burned his wife, Pavlov’s mother, when she had died a few months past—but she had insisted on being buried in the ground, and he had respected her wish. As for myself, the father said, you, my son, will bring me fire.

  Pavlov looked at his father again and saw a gentle, eccentric man, and he pitied him and loved him all the more.

  * * *

  At dawn, the father woke the son, gathered ashes from the furnace, mixed them with water, and pasted them all over his face and hands.

  Pavlov brushed his teeth and washed his face, and went to stand outside beside his father. He was both embarrassed and filled with wonder. It was cold that morning—the cold of soldiers marching towards battle, stomping across farmers’ fields, cold in the way vengeful villagers steal dead soldiers’ shoes after defeat in battle, cold like that rosy dawn in which the wounded trip over vegetables, roots and dead branches, bruised, shot, stabbed and hallucinating of a wedding with a farmer’s girl who will lead them towards their warrior heaven. Pavlov looked at the vast empty mountains while his father chanted. Then his father kissed Pavlov on the forehead, took his hand and led him in another dance, singing in a foreign language. Pavlov danced and smiled, bewildered but surrendering to his father’s wishes and following his steps.

  Afterwards, he helped gather the ashes from the crematorium and fold them in a cloth. The two of them walked along a narrow path, through bushes and between tall, prehistoric rocks until they reached a cliff that looked out onto a steep valley. The view was sublime and the wind passed over them, just as it had passed over the succession of round green hills and into the valley. Pavlov’s father flipped the cloth open, and the ashes were taken by the wind and the dust scattered in one direction. The northern wind, his father said, leads south, and the easterly wind leads west and carries with it the scent of time.

  Inside the house, his father washed his hands and face, dried them with a cloth, fed the cloth into the stove in the middle of the room and let it burn.

  Then father and son drove back to the city of Beirut, once more they drove, in silence under the falling bombs. The war had resumed.

  AT THE WINDOW

  The man who had been given the name Pavlov by his father stood at his window above the road that led to the cemetery, and waited for the bells to toll. Upon hearing that sound, he swallowed his saliva and settled in to watch the procession going by.

  Women in black gowns dragged their ponderous heels on the unpaved road, and men in sombre colours shortened, with their breath, white cigarettes trapped between their scissor-like fingers and lead-filled teeth. Pavlov recognized a few of the men, despite their newly sad faces and their hunched shoulders that reminded him of hungry dogs on their way to disposal bins behind the city’s restaurants and butcher shops.

  He watched as one of the neighbourhood’s two clergymen performed the burial ceremonies. Since his birth, for twenty years, he had witnessed the traffic of floating caskets passing under his prominent nose, and he could predict the priests’ repetitive movements, recite their chants by heart, smell the swinging incense burners chained like dogs on leashes as the priests recited prayers over bones and caskets. The clergymen’s long black robes, carefully trimmed just above the ankles, avoided the dust that rose from beneath their shoes.

  Upon the sight of either priest, Pavlov would look at the floor and curse the hour of the man’s birth. He blamed the ancient Egyptians for these masquerades, for the invention of priesthood and its deep power. He also cursed the Platonic “junta”—as he referred to the Neoplatonic philosophers—for preaching the transmigration of souls.

  Everyone aspires to end as a king—a dead king. His father had said these words only last year, on his most recent trip with Pavlov to the cremation site on the mountain.

  Pavlov lived alone with his father in a two-storey house above the cemetery road. His sister had eloped six years ago with a butcher who lived high in the mountains. She had despised the passage of the dead in their coffins beneath the family’s front window. Their mother, who had died soon after Pavlov turned sixteen, was buried in the cemetery across from the house. After his sister’s departure and his mother’s illness and death, Pavlov had become the custodian of the window of death, the sole observer above the cemetery road.

  Down below, the passage of coffins was a ritual watched by everyone in the neighbourhood except Pavlov’s father the undertaker, and his father’s two brothers, the assistant undertakers, who would wait by the grave, hosts at the bedside of the open earth.

  Now, standing at the window, Pavlov reached for his box of cigarettes and arbitrarily withdrew one by the tip of its beak. He contemplated the rebirth of ashes inside its rolled and flaming paper. Fire, Pavlov thought. How fond his father was of fire. His father would occasionally mention the mysterious Society that was somehow connected with fire, but Pavlov still did not know exactly what it was. And since Pavlov had never met anyone else from this elusive society, he believed it must be yet another of his father’s eccentric fables, or part of some esoteric religious liturgy that his father would mutter when no one but Pavlov was present, or in the presence of the dead.

  This world, my son, he would tell Pavlov, was created by a lesser God. The true God, the God of light, is beyond the realm of this demeaning world. And when he washed the dead, Pavlov’s father would utter words both of love and of disdain. Oh, this body of yours, he would say to the cadaver, this entrapment of filth and a handful of light. He would sometimes dance, and sometimes sing, and on a few occasions Pavlov had even seen him cry.

  Over the past few years Pavlov had learned to perfectly time his cigarette. He smoked and looked at the horizon to avoid seeing the clergymen walk by, mumbling to himself, mocking them. By the third or fourth puff, wailing women would have reached the corner of his house, and that was when the men in the procession would turn and signal to the women to halt and not continue to the cemetery. The descent of the casket would be witnessed only by the men, as the norms of this ancient Christian community dictated. But once in a while a persistent sister or mother would rush towards the metal gate and try to rescue her loved one before the mudhole swallowed the remains beneath the men’s black ties and the sealing shovels of the gravediggers. Pavlov would watch these renegade women from his window. Some would grab the metal bars of the cemetery gate and beg for their loved one’s resurrection before falling on their knees and weeping in acceptance, and slowly fading into silence. Others would scream and challenge the gods, Prove you really exist. I am going to close my eyes and count to three and you will bring my child back here!

  Pavlov knew the sound of bells was the cruellest thing the relatives of the dead would endure in the day
s after a burial. He felt a perverse privilege in watching the mourning daughters, sisters and mothers pass underneath his window. He cried at the sight of their beauty. Death and tears, he thought—that’s what it takes for this world to be made humble. He blamed his sentimentality on his religious upbringing. The aesthetic of sadness that his tribe had perfected was something conditioned into his being, and certainly the location of his house, and the repetitive migrations of death beneath his window, had through the years engraved in him a love of tragic beauty.

  Men and women he recognized from his long years of captivity in his insular neighbourhood were transformed on this path into howling bodies. The women’s elegant black dresses and the tears appearing on their cheeks like morning dew seemed to him to be the most truthful expression of his world. It was the little white handkerchiefs that always got him—cloth that must be the gifts of mysterious lovers, he fancied. Black handkerchiefs, on the other hand, he imagined to be self-acquired, as they were usually owned by the older women for whom these romantic gestures no longer held the same hope; their greying heads had passed along these roads before, and utilitarian ornaments such as handkerchiefs and hairpins and black stockings had become part of life’s necessities. During times of burial, phrases emerged from these women in short bursts, sentences that referenced the most mundane recollections of their loved ones: I cooked that dish today…The radio is still on…My sweet such-and-such said to me yesterday…The neighbour prepared food and we waited…