Beirut Hellfire Society

by Rawi Hage

  Standing now in his kitchen, Pavlov knew he would soon hear the drumbeat of the brass band—the singular, repeating beat usually executed by an eager band member. This band was only ever invited to play music for the youthful dead. And upon hearing it, Pavlov would salivate and feel the urge to shift his hips and stretch his back before padding out to the balcony.

  He hurried to buy cigarettes before the horizontal passage of the dead, putting on his dark suit and rushing out to the end of the street to catch the grocer before the man lowered his metal door. He was determined to get his pack of cigarettes and his favourite brand of matches. Through the years, he had learned the value of fire and wood. Hindus, unlike the Abrahamic sons of this region, burn their dead—this he had learned from his father the undertaker—as did the Greeks of antiquity. And it was the duty, his father had said, of the male heir to light the fire. The idea of a grand bonfire in place of a coffin intrigued Pavlov. He imagined himself standing on his balcony and watching the flickering light, little floating red particles, his ceremonial cigarette joining the fleeting étincelles as his own contribution to the burning. Earth and the ground are overrated, his father had said. It is smoke that matters, that fleeing gesture of escape that reaches beyond lands and borders and claimed territories. He remembered his father speaking of the universality of fire, the antiquity of the flame, and quoting Heraclitus: All things change to fire, and fire, exhausted, falls back into all things.

  Poor terrestrial dead, Pavlov thought, miserable cadavers confined to their rectangular demarcation. They have to endure the crushing weight of the earth, and the bird’s-eye view of apathetic gravediggers pouring earth into their eyes. He hurried back home, lit a cigarette and stood on his balcony. He inhaled and exhaled with force, and bade farewell to the smoke on this day of light rain and blossoming trees and the shameless appearance of flowers, pink pirouettes exuberant with scent and colour that mingled with bullets falling from weapons in the hands of fighters wearing cheap white sneakers with green rubber soles made in China.

  And now the brass band played, and the mourners arrived. When the dead was a young, unmarried man like Tariq, the custom was to dance with the coffin, enacting the missed and now impossible wedding, while carrying it down the burial road. But how had this custom of dancing coffins, which Pavlov had simply accepted all these years, come about? He suddenly thought, What an absurd idea—to dance with wooden boxes carrying a dead person inside. What a parade, a charade, a mockery of the fine art of dancing…Oh, the nausea of death, he thought, the vomit of the stiff on padded silk pillows. The rattling of devils’ tails inside the red entrails of a satin coffin, and the smell of powdered baby angels, must have made the corpse quite dizzy.

  As a kid, when his father had stood solemnly at the cemetery gate awaiting the approach of a dancing casket, Pavlov would stand on this same balcony and laugh, dancing to the music of the marching band. The six men lifting the box created the shape of a wobbly, mythical creature with twelve arms, twelve legs swaying its way towards the edge of a man-made pit. The band played tunes for which Pavlov made up various names: The Dance of Drunken Coffins, A Weeping of Happy Feet, An Enchanting Choice of Radio Music. And he would wonder about the positions of the grooms inside the boxes on their bumpy ride towards the grand altar down below.

  Then one day his mother had smacked him hard on the head and called him blasphemous. What if the parents of the dead see you? You’re not supposed to do this. Who taught you to laugh? All those books you’ve been reading, have they made you insensitive and corrupt! To punish him, she threatened to burn his books, especially those of the Greeks he so often quoted in his youth.

  Now Pavlov watched with a tiny smile and wondered again: Who had started this daring custom of dancing with coffins? It couldn’t have been the Egyptians, he reasoned, because pharaohs were married at a very early age, and even from the little reading he had done on Egyptian ritual, Pavlov had concluded they were not as crass about their burials as his own bastard nation of invading Canaanites, Egyptians, Hittites, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Vikings, Arabs, Mongols, crusaders, pirates and Turks. Imagine, he thought, if every once in a while a young cadaver were to leave his coffin and chase a few nearby virgins or widows to try to consummate his marriage. Yes, he reasoned, weddings and burials are the same. Exactly the same. In both, weeping and celebration exist side by side. They are part of the dialectic that includes hermaphrodites and semi-gods, the Manichaean stripes of zebras, double agents in war movies, Siamese twins, divided cities, border rivers and Homeric sirens of the sea.

  On this day of Tariq the fighter’s burial, mourners danced and wept, and the deceased’s dog trailed the pack of men to the cemetery. There, the dog stopped at the gate and whimpered and howled, then walked to the foot of the wall, sniffing in search of his master. The dog lay there all night.

  In the morning, before dawn, Pavlov brought Rex some water, a handful of cooked rice and vegetables, and small pieces of meat.

  OF UNCLES AND COUSINS

  Pavlov’s twin uncles, Maurice (the elder) and Mounir (the younger)—or the two big sweaty brutes, as Pavlov called them—lived at the edge of the cemetery in a three-storey house with their funeral home on the ground floor. The elder resided on the third floor, with his wife; and the younger on the second floor with his wife, their ever-laughing daughter Salwa and their idiotic son Pierre.

  The business had been started by Pavlov’s father, who later hired his brothers and helped build their two homes above the funeral parlour. The ground-floor business had a showroom in front and a large vault at the back where the caskets were kept. This was also where blood was drained and bodies cleaned, stitched, dressed up and made up. In these years of war, business was booming.

  After the death of his father, Pavlov and his sister had sold their father’s share of the enterprise to their uncles. The uncles took full possession of the ground floor, including the leftover coffins, the tools, the disinfecting chemicals and the chrome tables, and two of the hearses—or “deathmobiles” as Pavlov termed them. The twins had paid Pavlov and Nathalie a small advance, and promised to pay the rest soon after. His sister asked Pavlov to hold one of the hearses as collateral for the payment.

  Pavlov detested his uncles. They were so different from his father, these twin brutes, these vultures who—in the absence of their brother—now walked the grounds of the cemetery at night, opening newly buried coffins to collect rings, shoes, crucifixes, cufflinks, necklaces, memorabilia, even flowers, if still fresh, to reuse at the next burial. From his window, he could see their flashlights whirling, like confused nocturnal creatures. He heard their laughter and deadpan jokes. In their quiet, mocking voices, they would address the cadavers using villagers’ accents: O So-and-so, hear me now and may the devil have mercy on your soul, and allow me to hold your hand and check the time on your expensive wristwatch. I hear that these leather shoes are too tight on you…I will stretch them a bit while you’re busy dancing with the devil’s wife there…

  These brutes sometimes even brought along the younger’s dimwitted son and daughter with her hyena laugh. Once in a while, when delinquent kids tried to sneak into the cemetery at night to spray-paint tombs with war slogans, making their mark on destiny with their heroic lettering and fighters’ nicknames, the younger brute would send Salwa out alone, to release her hyena laugh. She would laugh even louder when the kids fled, throwing themselves over the fences and pissing their pants, trembling in horror and fear.

  One afternoon, these twin uncles Maurice and Mounir knocked at Pavlov’s door and asked for the second hearse. With the torrent of war deaths, they needed the extra car. Pavlov refused—unless they first paid the balance owed to him and his sister. The uncles promised to pay it soon, but Pavlov still would not give them the key or the registration papers. Maurice, the elder, told him that his father was watching from above and would be ashamed of his behaviour and his greed. Pavlov slammed the door shut, then opened it to warn his uncles not to t
ouch the car or come to the house again without bringing what they owed. Mounir, the hotheaded younger uncle, threatened Pavlov—but Pavlov laughed at him. Then he barked and bared his teeth, and the uncles slunk away.

  JEAN YACOUB

  A stranger knocked at Pavlov’s door.

  My name is Jean Yacoub, the man said. I was referred to you by the Society. May I come in?

  Pavlov ushered him inside.

  You must be Pavlov, the man said.

  Pavlov nodded and offered him cigarettes and coffee.

  The man accepted a cigarette but didn’t touch the coffee. He seemed reluctant to speak, murmuring platitudes about the tailbacks he had encountered on his way through town. A big sinkhole had caused masses of traffic, he said.

  Finally, Pavlov quietly, gently asked him the purpose of his visit.

  Well, the man said, hesitantly. Then he spoke in a rush, without pause: My wife left me and ran away to France with another man. Now she is remarried and has her own life and family there. I used to lock her inside our house, demanding that she read a book a day, and telling her that when I got back from work I would test her. I did this to make sure that she never left the house for long or cheated on me. But later I found out that she didn’t read the books and made up the stories she told me. She knew I hadn’t read the books either. Eventually she left, got married again and had children, leaving me with our son. She put our marriage behind her.

  My great tragedy is the loss of my son. Years ago, I discovered that my son had a preference for men…You know what I mean. To put it bluntly, he was homosexual. When I found out, I disowned him. He left the house and never came back. Two years passed and I never asked anyone of his whereabouts. Still, I heard that he was living with a lover, a man. So I knew he was having sex with men, and at the time the thought of this repulsed me. I couldn’t deal with the idea of it, the profanity, the filth involved, these acts of sodomy that I imagined. It haunted me. I even sent him a message through his aunt, who was accepting of his condition, reiterating that I had disowned him.

  After the war broke out, on one of those nights of bombardment, my son showed up at my door, drunk, in the company of a militia thug—his lover, I assumed. The man was in uniform, with a gun at his waist and a large golden cross on his chest. I remember he had a bear’s build and a killer’s eyes. He and my son sat facing me on the sofa. In my house, they chain-smoked and played with each other’s hair and kissed. All this was meant to provoke me. When I objected and told them to leave, my son’s lover pulled out the gun and laid it on the coffee table in front of my eyes. He then picked up the gun, waved it in my face and said that if I ever tried to contact my son again, he would kill me. Imagine. And my son laughed. He didn’t mind seeing me humiliated by this hooligan, this piece of excrement who threatened his father in his own home.

  A few months later, my sister, who by then had invited my son to live with her, knocked at my door wailing and screaming. She informed me that my son had been shot and killed on the stairs of her building.

  I was devastated. Death makes one forgive and love again. We humans only value our losses and regrets. I am a despicable man, Mr. Pavlov. My son is extinct. My sister has since died. She couldn’t take the loss—maybe because she loved my son more than I did. She felt responsible, and she died from sadness. I am now alone.

  When my son was shot, I was told, he was high and making love to another man on the stairs of my sister’s building. He had been spotted by a warlord who was coming down from his apartment with two of his men. They shot my son and his lover on the spot. Then they stuck the bodies in a jeep, drove to the beach and threw them into a dumpster. No one claimed the bodies. And no one knew my son’s whereabouts. This story is true. I heard later that the warlord’s bodyguards bragged about killing two homosexuals.

  I tried to find my son’s body, in vain. I wanted to cry over his body that had caused both of us so much pain. And I wanted to properly mourn him.

  For years, I asked every hospital in Beirut about my son’s remains, but could find no answer. I tried to complain to the militia, but they gave me the runaround. They even sent two men to threaten me. I started to pray again. I prayed for forgiveness from a God who never forgave my son, a God who had refused him the freedom to live as he desired, a God who taught me to refuse my son’s desires. But one day, I found I was tired of blaming myself. When I thought about it, I realized I had blamed everything on that God, the same God I had asked forgiveness from. It is confusing, isn’t it, dear Pavlov? To demand forgiveness from your oppressors.

  I became obsessed with men who have effeminate mannerisms. I would walk around my neighbourhood and observe them with a mixture of pity, sadness and love. That is when I encountered El-Marquis in the elevator of my building. I introduced myself and asked if I might have a private conversation with him. He smiled and said, And what is on your mind?

  My son who died, I said. He preferred the company of men.

  El-Marquis ignored the fact that the elevator had arrived at his floor and continued on with me. At my invitation, he entered my home.

  We sat. He asked for a drink. Then he said, Many parents consider the act of love between two men degenerate.

  I did, I said. But I no longer think so. My loss was devastating. Morality looks banal in the presence of such a grand and total loss.

  El-Marquis nodded and gave me your father’s name. And he told me about his work picking up unclaimed cadavers, and about his love of fire.

  The next day, I walked to the cemetery across the road from your house. I observed your father standing at the gate, murmuring his own prayers and carrying a small torch in his hand. He looked different—concerned, and not blasé, like one would expect an undertaker to be. The next day, I visited him on the pretext of arranging my own funeral. The first thing I said to him was, Fire is better than dust. And his face lit up.

  After he had heard my story, he told me that two springs earlier he had recovered two male bodies from the Quarantina garbage dump by the shore. These bodies had been beaten, and their sex had been shot. One of them was wearing women’s underwear and had straight hair and a small diamond in his ear. He showed me the diamond.

  I knew straight away that these were the bodies of my son and his friend.

  Your father confessed to me that he had secretly cremated them and performed his own prayers, against the dictates of the clergy in this land, and spread their ashes in a valley up in the mountains. He said that he would eventually take me there but the location had to remain a secret because he lived in fear of the clergy’s wrath.

  I was very ill and in hospital for a while after that. So my trip with your father had to be postponed. And then, a little while ago, I learned that he had died.

  When we were talking, your father also mentioned you, his son. He said “we,” and he said your name. Were you present when your father scattered my son’s ashes? You are now my only link, my only hope to rectify the wrongs I have done in my life.

  I am a dying man and I am asking you to do the same thing for me that your father did for my poor son. After my death, I ask you to burn me and spread my ashes in the same valley as my son and his lover. I will pay you handsomely, and I will also arrange to have my body delivered to you. I am alone. Everyone around me has fled or died. No one will notice my absence. I have no one and nothing left but my wish to take last flight in the same place as my son.

  The man stopped speaking, and looked at Pavlov.

  I can help you, Pavlov said.

  The man withdrew some cash and set it on the table.

  The rest of the money will be delivered with my body, he said. Thank you.

  And with this, Jean Yacoub stood and left.

  INTRODUCING THE LADY OF THE STAIRS

  In a peaceful moment—when bombs were not falling so close as to obscure the rosy, sunny morning that was about to imbue the old trees in the cemetery with shades of green, when the sand in the shape of immobile dunes was dispersed by th
e morning air to expose a crust of the soil above the skeleton of the earth, when the headstones weighted by the corpulence of years were cloaked with resilient layers of bright moss—here was Pavlov, standing at his window. He was watching a procession slowly moving towards the gate, a warm cup of coffee in his hand, its steam ascending to block the rays of the sun, when he heard the swift whistle of a bomb preparing to land on the road below his window. Glass shattered and fell on Pavlov’s head, and he saw a cloud of grey, dense smoke, and then he sensed a ponderous silence in his chest. In that silence, he heard a faint moan creeping up from below. He stood and walked out onto his balcony and glanced at the road.

  There was a casket on the ground. It was surrounded by injured and dead mourners, their bodies in black, lying flat, parallel to the earth. Heads, thighs, shoes, blood. Death was everywhere. Burials will be required, Pavlov murmured. A bomb had landed in front of the priest and shredded him. The body was lying on the ground without a head, decapitated. The priest’s shoe, filled with his five toes and an ankle, had landed on Pavlov’s balcony.

  Pavlov ran down the stairs to the street. Frantic, panting, and with a piece of glass piercing his forehead, he rushed to help the injured, piling them into cars heading to the hospitals. His uncles, who had been awaiting the casket at the cemetery gate, stood unmoving, eyes wide in amazement, taking in their good fortune. Salwa, Pavlov’s cousin, started to release her loud nocturnal laugh while her brother Pierre went home to call his mother and aunt to attend the spectacle.

  A young woman wandering aimlessly in shock came to rest at the entrance to Pavlov’s home. She sat on the ground, covered in blood. Pavlov offered his help, but she didn’t seem injured. She had lost her entire family, she told him. She screamed then laughed and mumbled, and then she lost her mind. They’re coming, coffee no sugar, coffee no sugar, she repeated. They just went there…They are coming back, they are here, welcome…Make coffee, bring chairs…Pavlov took her by the hand and led her just inside, to the bottom stair. He looked into her vacant eyes and realized that she had gone mad. So he left her with her incantations of hospitality and rushed outside once more to attend to the injured.