Beirut Hellfire Society

by Rawi Hage

  Pavlov observed, from his position as spectator of death, that no matter how tragic their beloved’s demise, in times of burial these women never laid direct blame on the killers or on the brutality of life, or on war for that matter. Nor did they blame rulers or deities. What remained with them were these fragmented memories of daily repetitive gestures. He saw that women, in gathering close to death, were in these times of mourning the producers of a most unique symphony, a collective weeping that had evolved into one of mankind’s most sophisticated chants. It was often initiated by a non-member of the clan, one who nonetheless considered herself part of the deceased’s family. The instinctive harmony, Pavlov theorized, must have evolved over the millennia of loss and death that every species endures before its inevitable, eventual extinction. Perhaps the women’s chorus of grief was an attempt to prevent further deaths, which, in a time of burial, would certainly be catastrophic and result in great disorder. Or so Pavlov imagined as he smoked and watched.

  After the procession was over, he would retreat to his bedroom, drop the cigarette on the floor, step on it, lie down on his bed, loosen his tie and liberate himself from the burden of cloth and thread. Then he would pull an old book from his father’s library and, naked, light a cigarette and read through the night.

  THREE BOMBS

  The undertakers were busier than ever.

  Beirut had been bombed for days on end and the road to the cemetery hosted three or four processions a day. Some mourners went to the graveyard and then came back to stand under Pavlov’s balcony, waiting for the next procession to arrive so they could join the march again. Men stood around and smoked and talked about everything and anything except death and the deceased while Pavlov assisted his father and his uncles, digging up the ground in profound rectangular shapes, driving the hearse back and forth, cleaning and beautifying the dead, and burying them.

  On a sunny Sunday, as Pavlov’s two uncles were praying with their families in church and his father was readying the earth for the next burial, three bombs were fired towards the east side of the city. They gathered in the air, suspended, indecisive, assessing their targets, and for a fraction of a second they formed a trinity witnessed only by Pavlov, the man whose name declared his preference for dogs over humans.

  The first bomb headed for the city’s port, flying above the concrete buildings with vicious velocity, and above reception aerials, to the bewilderment of the local TV anchors and the amusement of cartoon characters pounding each other inside their small glass screens. It looked down on the cement houses, water tanks and pigeon coops on the rooftops, down on the residents cooking in their Teflon non-stick pots, then made its way to the French stairs that linked the little hill of Achrafieh to the lower part of the neighbourhood of Gemmayze, where the houses are more elaborate, with their Ottoman and Florentine architecture, their large tripartite arched windows dominating their facades and hosting morning sunlight that struck directly the chain-smoker inhabitants fanning their long eyelashes to chase away the fumes escaping their nostrils and the ash landing on their outrageously tailored dresses, carbon copies of the garments in French fashion magazines found in dentists’ offices or sold by bored merchants confined to kiosk cigarette counters with displays of lottery tickets and relentless chewing gum, gum bought and pulped by the wisdom teeth of women in hairdressing salons toasting their painted heads in spherical dryers that resembled the helmets of alien visitors in B-rated movies, visitors from outer space. Bombs or no bombs, I am fixing my hair, said a woman named Marie, and I am having a pedicure and a manicure. I refuse to look like a maid. War or no war, I’ll pull back my husband’s eye if it wanders sideways or upwards to the apartment of that whore Evelyne Khoury who shows her inner thighs through the balcony bars and advertises her grand tits between the open casements. Moi, cherie, j’aime pas les chrameets, et Evelyne est une charmoutah. How I hate her!

  This first bomb disregarded the Electric Company building, missed the tower of a little Armenian church and headed down towards the seaside, where it whizzed over the head of a grocer engrossed by the expiry dates on canned food and exhausted by the talk of war in the newspapers, finally to land on the port’s plateau where containers carried by faraway ships were deposited on transit ground, destined for the deserted planets of the Gulf and for the newly oil-rich to gorge themselves on French liqueurs, perfume, extravagant cars and entertaining appliances, indulging a stupefying taste for Western modernity that would surely afford them a higher status. The bomb killed two Nazarene men who were stealing goods from blown-out opened-up containers at the port, and another man in his thirties who was later described as long-haired, wearing a long robe like a woman, with filthy feet in Roman sandals, and who stood in the open harbour space mumbling to himself words of wrath and forgiveness. The bomb left the long-haired man intact except for a wound below his left ribcage and a few holes in his palms and feet, but these wounds prevented him from carrying away any of the stolen goods, or eating the candies or gum that kept on slipping through the hole in his palm as the missiles kept falling.

  The second bomb landed in the populous neighbourhood of Karm el-Zeitoun, on a barbershop, and claimed five lives. All of the victims were retired men, some living off their sons who sent money from abroad, some apt to wander around in their night pyjamas as if challenging the daytime that only brought them war and misery. All five gathered every morning at the same time for a coffee at the barbershop and to speculate on politics and posture before the oval glass, prophesying on bets and on racehorses. All of the men died, but the barber, who happened to be in the backroom boiling the morning Arabic coffee, survived. The barber did not blame himself for the massacre, but he would never again touch a cup of coffee after the incident and gave free haircuts on the sidewalk outside the shell of his old shop until his death a few weeks later.

  The third bomb swirled twice around the church bell and rushed to the densely populated side of a small neighbourhood laden with cars and little shops. It froze, then suddenly changed direction and aimed towards the quiet side of the cemetery. It landed at the far end, where a gravedigger, shovel in hand, had been standing above a rectangular hole in the ground, contemplating the horizontal dimensions of the stiff whose coffin he would later lay to rest. The gravedigger was sweating, perhaps from the high sun that fell upon the city that day.

  The bomb landed at his side, interrupting the methodical rhythm of his shovelling, leaving unanswered the question of whether he had any final tune in his head, or if he realized at that moment the irony of his own death while part of him fell into his own man-made pit.

  The man’s son, Pavlov, who happened to be standing at the window of the adjacent house, giving him a clear view of the cemetery grounds, looked for his father after the smoke had cleared, but couldn’t see him. He rushed to rescue his father’s remains, but there was little left to gather. Most of the body was found in the pit, but some parts were scattered on graves and headstones and in the trees.

  In this way, Pavlov lost both his parents.

  His father was reburied a few days later, beside his mother—despite Pavlov’s quiet objection to his sister and his uncles. One of his uncles added his father’s name to the headstone and sealed the argument. The night of that burial day, Pavlov brought a light to his cigarette and laid the burning cylinder on top of the grave. A temporary fire, he whispered to his father. One day, when the time is right, I’ll exhume your body and burn it, and offer your ashes to the wind.

  POSSESSIONS

  A short while later, Pavlov’s sister Nathalie drove with her husband Joseph back to the city. They came with their little daughter, dragging their muddy, heavy villagers’ shoes up the stairs of the family home. And when they reached Pavlov’s door, they peeped inside before entering. They paused and looked, pretending to catch their breath from the conquest of the stairs, wondering what had changed in the house in their long absence, what had been added or subtracted. Then they sighed in the knowledge that nothing h
ad changed. Everything was the same, except that Pavlov’s father had now removed himself from the company of the furniture.

  The husband, Joseph, indifferent and reluctant, but dragged forwards by his wife and by all the inadequacy that hung off the tip of his married man’s nose, like a big bull dragged by a ring that alternated between his middle finger and his painful-as-if-pierced nostrils, hung his head and took a deep breath, filling his gigantic chest with the city’s pathological air of bronchospasms, sewers, fossil fuels and body odours. Like a Mongol invader, he feared and scorned cities. For the first fifteen years of his life, he had never seen one. His closest encounters with cities were the city folk who arrived in his village of Kfaroumeh on summer holidays. They looked odd to him, arrogant women, men who spoke like singers on the radio. They drove their cars heedlessly, never stopping to greet anyone, never looking you in the eye, and if you happened to be walking they would never stop to offer a lift. But in his wife he had found both aloofness and humility. Though a city girl, she always seemed like a villager to him, humble yet assertive. She loved the village and the people in the village loved her. But she kept her father’s profession a secret. When asked, she would answer: My father ploughs for a living.

  Pavlov’s sister and her husband took everything modern, utilitarian and functional in the house: kitchenware, quilts, furniture and clothes. They took all that they could carry, packing it up with the rush of thieves during a riot. Their energy seemed to rise with the weight of the goods in their hands. And they proclaimed their gratitude for gravity: descending is easier, they said, even with a weight in your arms; it’s going up that is hard. They stated the obvious and took the obvious, leaving Pavlov with the various objects his father had collected from dead loners who’d had no one to mourn them—rifles or paintings or cameras, diverse objects that lay unmoved by quiet endings.

  Pavlov’s father had been a hoarder of death’s memorabilia; he’d collected everything and anything the dead no longer had any use for. Those who couldn’t afford burials had paid him in paintings, old magazines, books, vases and stamp collections. Those who had died without heirs had their belongings and jewellery brought home. Once in a while, his father would bring home the unclaimed cadaver of a vagrant from under a bridge, an old person who had lived alone with no one to account for them, wanderers, outlaws, dead foreign workers trapped in a land of war where no money was available to repatriate them. When Pavlov had reached his thirteenth birthday, his father began to take him along to pick up “orphaned bodies,” as his father called them. He would hand Pavlov gloves and a mask, and they would collect the dead and bring the body to the funeral home. His father would keep the anonymous corpse for a day or two, clean it and dress it, and then he would disappear with it overnight, all by himself, and come back the following morning. When Pavlov asked where he had gone, his father would reply, A meeting with the Society.

  Nathalie and Joseph ignored the paintings, the antiques, the diaries of the dead, the mittens and the old church ladies’ scarves, the rosaries, the drawers filled with knick-knacks and photo albums, the elaborate hats, the canes, vases, false teeth and medicinal ivory boxes, the Roman busts and Turkish vases, the jade, the old books and English china. They took the large carpets and left the small ones to Pavlov. They took the sofas, the dressers and massive wooden armoires, the mirror with its heavy frame. And his sister, before she got into her butcher husband’s truck, said to Pavlov, Sell the house and come live with us.

  But Pavlov refused. I like it here, he said.

  And what do you like about it? his sister cried angrily.

  The view, he said, and gave her a small smile.

  You stay here among the dead, then. I am going back to the country, to a place where everything is always alive.

  Nothing is alive forever, Pavlov said.

  Oh, you and your Greeks, Nathalie replied. And she climbed into the truck and sat beside her husband, holding another box in her hands.

  The butcher was quiet. He was only half-literate, and had a dolichocephalic head, and it seemed to Pavlov as if his red cheeks must have, through the years, absorbed the colours of the bare flesh he assaulted and divided in his little shop. His hands were thick, so unlike the curiously delicate hands of Pavlov’s father, the undertaker and mortician who fancied himself a surgeon or the owner of a beauty parlour specializing in red nails, platitudes and neighbourhood gossip. I guess, Pavlov thought, the butcher’s hands that profit from taking apart the dead need to be stronger than the hands of a man who decorates them.

  NADJA

  After his sister’s departure, Pavlov stayed alone at home for a long while. He lingered on his balcony, he gazed at the night sky. He smoked. He turned on the transistor radio and walked back to the balcony to join his drink before the alcohol evaporated or was swallowed by some wandering spirit from the underground. Sometimes he caught a tune from the radio and slowly swayed and eventually danced. He moved with a twitch in his eye, dodging the smoke from the cigarette migrating between his lip and the tips of his fingers. He danced for the sun scuttling down towards Hades. He thought of the Greeks again, he thought of Helen standing by the walls of Troy in the company of a king, gesticulating and lamenting warriors’ deaths. He did his reverse dance, turning his back to the window and the world, gazing at the last luminosity on the wall inside the house, reciting the Iliad, a book that he had read again and again in both his youth and his adulthood, imagining the crosses across the road in the cemetery turning into spears, and mourners’ prayers into battle cries, and captive Helen looking down from the Trojan wall.

  And then he thought of Nadja, a prostitute who had come to visit his father one night, in the company of two of her friends, to bury a third friend who had been killed by her captor.

  This was a night long after his mother’s death and his sister’s departure. Three women had knocked on his father’s door and walked up the stairs in their high heels, their blond hair loose on their shoulders. The Society had sent them, they said, and his father had offered them coffee. Then he said, I’ll come with my son to pick up your loved one.

  Come late at night, they told Pavlov’s father. And they arranged to meet him on a side street.

  Pavlov had listened closely to Nadja as she explained everything to his father in a heavy French accent. Then she turned to her co-workers and switched into a foreign language that Pavlov imagined to be Trojan Greek.

  When his father asked Pavlov to escort the ladies back downstairs, Pavlov walked ahead with a torch in hand, and at the bottom of the staircase he gallantly gave Nadja his hand to overcome the last step. Merci, she said, in a soft, singing tone.

  He asked her if she spoke Greek.

  Greek! Nadja said, and all three women laughed. No, we don’t.

  The next night, Pavlov and his father drove to the Naba’a neighbourhood. They passed the little bridge that linked Achrafieh to Bourj Hammoud and one of the women met them on a corner near the famous Falafel Ajax. The woman got in, and together they drove through the maze of the neighbourhood and parked the hearse in a back alley. Pavlov and his father followed the woman into a house and up the stairs.

  Inside, the other two women were waiting, smoking. They looked nervous, but not sad. They also wore a look that Pavlov did not understand, perhaps one that surfaced after the presence of violence—or was it defiance he saw in their faces?

  Nadja led the way to the back room.

  A woman was laid out on the bed. She had been murdered. Blood covered her breast above the heart, and there were bruises on her arms and face. Pavlov’s father didn’t ask any questions, and after a moment the three women led him and Pavlov to another room, and opened the door. A dead man, also covered in blood, lay on the floor half-wrapped in a white sheet, a Caesar stabbed by many blades.

  We killed him, Nadja said calmly and without remorse, because he killed her.

  We’ll take care of both, Pavlov’s father said. But one at a time. The woman first. My son will com
e back for the man later.

  Later that night, Pavlov returned. Before he took the body to the car, he and Nadja stood above the dead man and spontaneously held hands.

  Then Pavlov carried the cadaver down the stairs, and Nadja followed him.

  Come back and see me sometime, she said.

  EL-MARQUIS VISITS PAVLOV

  Pavlov heard a car advancing along the cemetery road and parking outside his home. He peeked out the window. A tall man in white, with a wide white hat, stepped out of the car and knocked at Pavlov’s door.

  Pavlov hurried downstairs and opened the door. The man on the step was distinguished, if perhaps on the flamboyant side. He introduced himself as El-Marquis, and said that he had been a friend of Pavlov’s late father. Pavlov invited him in.

  Upstairs, the man sat down on the biggest chair in the living room, smiling at Pavlov before turning his attention to the empty walls.

  A minimalist, he said to Pavlov. I haven’t seen any of your fine species in our country for a while.

  Pavlov smiled. He was pleased by this observation. He chose a chair opposite the man in white, sat down and waited for him to speak.

  As I said, I am a friend of your late father, but let me be more specific. I am one of the founders of a group we call the Hellfire Society. You may have heard of us from your father. We had great respect for him.

  Pavlov nodded.

  His service to us was always indispensable.

  Pavlov kept his silence.

  Your father was a reluctant member of our society. We had our differences, but the respect for our separate beliefs was mutual. In short, he was a believer in the deities, or perhaps one deity. The rest of us have never believed in the existence of a God. But what we had in common was our defiance of the petty rulers of this world. For the most part, we express this in our own, you might say, libertine ways—or, in your father’s case, he expressed it with his religious conviction and rituals. We think that the body should be simultaneously celebrated and undermined, and I believe he felt the same way. He simply happened to believe in the transcendental, while we do not. Our paths crossed mostly over matters of death and burials. We paid your father for his services. Our members want to be buried outside the religious apparatus, which as you know is almost impossible in our conservative society. If you ask me, our state has managed to combine the worst of every system possible: pseudo-democracy with a deep theocratic foundation, while we pathologically live our daily existence by old feudal norms. I say that this region’s theocratic attachment is its downfall, but religion was something that your father and I often disagreed about. I would argue that our libertine ways are better suited than any religion to protect man’s core against the devastating and tragic reality of life. And most of our members want to be cremated, not “blessed” by any priest or clergy or traditional religion. We prefer to be “sprinkled,” as we called it. Confinement is never our choice, and the box, as we in the Society often jokingly call the coffin, is not for us. Ashes fly, but cadavers sink and rot. Have you been to the cremation place, Mr. Pavlov?