Beirut Hellfire Society

by Rawi Hage

  Howling and incoherent screams and shouts filled the dusty road in vertical and horizontal trajectories that disoriented him. In the chaos of blood and wounded limbs, everything seemed oddly palpable. Everything had either ceased to move or moved in slow motion, as flashing images and low voices alternating with screams reached his ears. He stood in the middle of a canvas of fragmented bodies arranged in a careful geometrical shape with a rectangular coffin at the centre, a coffin that had split in half, the lid resting a few metres away on the side of the dirt road. And among all the wounded and the dead, it seemed that the body in the coffin was the only one that had managed, willingly or miraculously, to remain intact—except for a pair of shoes that had been blown off, exposing the cadaver’s toes. The procession had disintegrated. No one stood upright, and everything lay flat like paper. The end of Homo erectus, thought Pavlov. The straight sombre line of mourners had been torn to pieces—or, at best, the mourners were on the ground, some crawling and exclaiming their thirst, others burned and choking with smoke and blood. There was no music, no orderly walking, no priest showing the path towards eternity. All that existed was killing and death, and from that moment on, Pavlov, who had all his life witnessed burials on this road but never mass murder, realized that the ceremonies that passed under his window had no meaning, that randomness was everything, and that from early childhood he had been a spectator to life’s cruelest acts of extinction.

  Now more cars rushed towards the cemetery road to pick up the wounded, and again a crescendo of shouts, an uproar, a pandemonium of agonizing howls rose and remained suspended in the air, the echo of wounds and death, red gushing from unbolted skin, moans of the dying and then the dignifying silence of those considerate victims, the ones who listen but do not speak, who weigh their words before exhaling their last breath, fixing their open eyes on one direction, one single image that asserts the void of life. Pavlov was left with a sharp pain in his head, beside a coffin that lay in perfect stillness in the middle of the dirt road. With blood pouring down his face, he stumbled, stepped on a body and fell beside it. The piece of glass seemed to penetrate farther into his head. Then he heard a crack inside his skull and saw the small fragment falling from his forehead to the ground, where the sun struck it and a feeble ray shone into his eyes. And he too started to scream as he got up and rushed towards an injured woman, blood dripping over his eyes, nose, chin. With his white shirt soaked, his red face and newly cardinal-like attire, he frightened the woman he was seeking to assist. He tried frantically to help her up, but she resisted and screamed hysterically. Other survivors were screaming also, calling out people’s names, walking as if dazed by smoke following a eucalyptus fire. The unholy smell of powder, metal and flesh joined that of holy incense around the coffin. Stray shoes were scattered across the ground. Some mourners died with their faces towards the earth while others faced the clouds, the blue of the sky reflected in their eyes, two bright dots in a sea of red.

  By now, Pavlov’s uncles were carrying cadavers from the centre of the road and laying them at the curb, arranging them by height and the size of their feet. Salwa was standing still, her laughter quieter, turning into chuckles. Then once again she released her disturbing cackle, which to Pavlov’s ears shifted between pure wickedness and a philosophical cry that summarized the absurdity of the world. Pavlov walked over to Salwa and slapped her hard. Her head swung to the left, bounced back, and she laughed once more in a short, loud burst. Then she fell silent and walked away without uttering a sound.

  Back home, drenched in blood and sorrow, Pavlov found the woman who had lost her entire family sitting on his stairs. She refused to come with him upstairs. He pulled her hand, but she held on to the rail and moaned in protest. Her brother and mother had died in the bomb, and so had her uncle and four of her relatives, and now she refused to leave the stairs. Finally, Pavlov walked up to his home, made coffee, and went back down with a tray in his hand and a glass of water. The woman started to cry again. She refused his offerings of coffee or food or liquid of any sort. Frustrated, he rushed back upstairs, splashed his face with water, wrapped his own bleeding head, drank water and sunk his head low in the basin of the sink. He started to whimper and mumble, until gradually every sound turned into an incomprehensible language in front of the cruelty of the mirror and the dismal abyss of the sink.

  Eventually he went downstairs again and looked closely at the woman. He realized that he knew who she was. He remembered her father’s burial two years ago and recalled the simplicity of the ceremony. He also remembered how she had held a delicate white lace handkerchief as she walked in the procession below his window. She had been modest in her pain, her arms around her little brother’s shoulders. She had wept that day, embracing her brother all the way, but today it was Pavlov who had carried her brother’s body to the back seat of a car. He had thrown the boy into the vehicle with complete disregard for his lightness and the possibility that he might take flight. It must have been his nerves, Pavlov decided, and his eagerness to run back to the others who were injured, that had made him throw the boy with such velocity. The body, in Pavlov’s memory, had hovered for a fraction of a second. This image of the boy above the car seat, suspended before the fall, hesitant even in death, stayed on Pavlov’s mind—a body that had the power to extend its position before landing, he thought, as if drawing a last breath, gathering a last burst of energy, one that all creatures express before annihilation, the last kick of prey pursued by predator, the last word, the last dance, a sigh. And then there are those who are fortunate enough to have the last laugh at this cruel existence.

  Yes, this woman’s little brother, who had walked wrapped in her arms during their father’s funeral procession, had been swinging in Pavlov’s arms today—or was it yesterday? His head hurt, and for once he felt himself to be an imposter who had stumbled upon a grand spectacle and forced his way in, a man who had left his seat in the audience and walked up on stage, interrupting a play, to the jeers of the spectators and the annoyance of the actors. Or was he more like a madman who, manifesto in hand, manages to release a few condemning words at the podium before being pounced upon and muffled by guards, and treated not as a rebel but as a fool…

  He sat down next to the woman on the stairs. Surely she must have been hit by shrapnel from the bomb, or pierced by glass, or even cut by flying pebbles or the body parts of the injured—a flapping lip, or sharp, high cheekbones, a wandering eye. He made the woman stand up and inspected her dress for blood, patted her back and hair, but she seemed intact, incredibly intact: all the blood and dirt attached to her had its genesis elsewhere. She again refused to go up the stairs with him. Pavlov sighed, lit a candle and began to pick small, dry blood clots from her hair. She let him do this—she even laughed and smiled at him—and then she slept.

  The next day, he brought her water and food. He fetched warm water in a large bucket, and calmly and affectionately asked her to take off her clothes, and washed her from head to toe at the bottom of the stairs. She clutched her arms around herself and rocked against the railing, playing with her own hair and laughing occasionally, a sound somewhere between a snigger and a belly laugh.

  This is farcical, Pavlov thought, it’s all a farce, and he laughed along with her.

  That night, he dreamed of coffins marching along the street. He saw himself standing at the window, watching a large figure in a long white robe swinging a stick while swaying and dancing against the tide of the procession and sweeping a cane in the air. Those it touched perished, and those it missed lived to regret not being touched by it. A dance, Pavlov imagined. A dance performed by death itself. Death continued to silently sway after the instruments fell to the ground and the music ceased. The figure in the white robe came and went, then disappeared into the horizon between outstretched bodies and headstones.

  It’s all just a dance, Pavlov thought. And nothing is more devastating than a dance.

  * * *

  In April, the streets and the
dust turned wet. The last rains fell in the company of bombs and bullets, transforming the sky into sustained, menacing thunder. Beirut, the grey city with its few remaining faint-yellow houses and its uneven pavement and its incoherent, convoluted roads, was humbled by the rain and the little streams rushing towards the French stairs that stretched from the top of the Achrafieh hills towards the lower city before reaching the port and the Mediterranean Sea.

  Ever since the massacre below Pavlov’s balcony, the city had been preoccupied with the seriousness of war and oblivious to its own ancient rain. The dancing for the dead had stopped, and so too had the long, slow marches towards the graveyard. Now people buried their dead in haste. They looked up anxiously for signs of destruction and listened for the bombs’ whistles. Families avoided the burial road; now only men walked in the dusty procession. Kids and women still spent their nights in vigils beside corpses, as was the custom, but now they bade farewell at their doorsteps, wailing and throwing themselves on the coffins in the manner of ancient Achaeans. Their crying and weeping no longer took place below the window of the man who affiliated himself with dogs.

  Soon, a new type of burial replaced the old. Young fighters stopped in front of Pavlov’s house in their military cars, wanting to bury their brothers in arms. The few musicians in the band who had survived the massacre were replaced by militia indifferent to scales and notes. Now, at the passage of their fallen comrades, these fighters raised their guns in the air and shot towards the clouds.

  GUNSHOT

  One afternoon, as a crescendo of bells on one side of the city asserted the call to prayer, and the pleas of the muezzins on the other side called for submission to God, Pavlov stood at his newly repaired window. He was watching a platoon of Christian militiamen facing his balcony. They stood in a row with their rifles raised towards the sky, ready to pay respects to a fallen comrade. One of the men looked at Pavlov and angled his rifle towards his window. At a signal from the head of the platoon, the militiamen fired. The bullet from the fighter who aimed at Pavlov missed by a couple of centimetres. It hit the wall and a small poof rose from the yellow-painted stone. Dust and particles fell on the road below.

  The young man had aimed to kill. Pavlov was sure of it. This warrior’s fire was not a mistake, a joke, or a protest at Pavlov’s voyeuristic position high above. The fighter had the look of murder—clear intent, index finger curved on the rifle’s trigger, and lunatic eyes that flashed in Pavlov’s mind with the same brightness as a gun’s barrel. He recalled the sharp, quick gesture of the fighter angling his rifle slightly, just enough to change the bullet’s direction from a homage to a kill. No, not a protest, this was not a protest, Pavlov concluded. This was not an objection to Pavlov’s fixed gaze, nor a statement of disrespect for the dead, nor anger at Pavlov’s vista overlooking the military and their martyrs. This was an act of deliberate design: to kill a spectator.

  And that spectator is me, Pavlov thought. Perhaps this was a banal killing for the sake of killing, just because this fighter could—in this time of lawlessness, in this age of carelessness and hate, in this civil war that opened windows of opportunity for the most impoverished, that elevated the deprived, the deranged, the meek with a yearning for vengeance and scores to settle. Yes, it was a time for the deprived to shine and take possession of the land; it was a time for the working men who once stood behind vegetable carts enduring petty negotiations and complaints about freshness to stand tall; it was a time of epiphany for the workers who had lugged their tool boxes up marble stairs to fix tubes and leaks in grand houses parading naked figures on expensive vases. Now these workers had discovered the benefits of gunshot. Now those sons of porters who had once run up and down stairs carrying groceries to the upper-class madame who couldn’t be bothered to cover her transparent nightgown in the presence of the help, who never stopped giving orders and striding about with her bare feet on polished marble floors, saying, Leave the bag here and not there, and carry this downstairs, and tell your coworkers to bring…this afternoon…and fix the—upon which the husband would land a tip right in the middle of the porter’s palm, giving him resentment and ideas about the value of revolutionary guns—now, in their military fatigues, how proud they look, and how dangerous they are.

  So why not fire at a man standing at a window above the line of death and shotguns? After all, accidents were common in the fertile presence of war. Pavlov had heard and seen it all, passing under his balcony. He knew of a young man who had shot another over a motorcycle ride. He knew of a fighter who had stepped on a land mine and miraculously trotted to safety—only to encounter another land mine. He knew of a boy who had mistaken a grenade for a toy; a stray bullet from a wedding celebration that had landed in someone’s head; traffic disputes that had resulted in deaths; villagers mistaken for birds and killed by urban hunters; and other inexplicable murders of passion, greed, machismo, idiocy, sexual bravado, domestic violence…in addition to heart attacks and old age and death multiplied a thousandfold.

  Perhaps this attempt on his life was a warning. Pavlov knew that his fixed gaze, his silent position, must make this pious, militaristic community, where hierarchies and heights were taken seriously, uneasy. But in fact, hardly anyone ever looked up towards him during processions. Rather, the trajectory of a mourner’s gaze was almost always a sliding slope towards the ground. Since childhood, he had stood at this same window and watched, confident he was rarely noticed or seen.

  It dawned on Pavlov that he was acquainted with the kid who had shot at his window. He had known this kid’s parents, had watched their caskets passing under his window when his own father was still alive. The kid had changed since then; he had grown rougher. The kid’s father had been a mechanic, a superstitious fool who had refused to admit Pavlov’s father’s hearse to the garage for repairs. The mechanic had feared cars that carried the dead. The kid who had shot at Pavlov used to help his own father in the garage, and would linger there, grabbing tires, rolling himself in an oval oil spot on the cement ground, his face covered in black smudges and engine grease as he moved with the slow momentum of lava flowing downhill.

  Yes, Pavlov remembered this kid. Once, when Pavlov was young, he’d been sent by his father to the garage, with a message for the mechanic. He recalled seeing the kid who had just tried to kill him emerge, greasy, assisting his father with the tools. Pavlov had envied the son, had envied the pagan, primitive disguise that the oil from the machines bestowed on the kid’s face, clothes and hands. Ah, he had thought, to walk like a heathen with a line of grease on your face, to camouflage yourself in bright daylight before everyone’s eyes, to leave your finger marks on your own forehead, to be different in your attire, careless, marked, seen and unseen, revered and mocked, your sweat turning to liquid grey lines—the alchemy of it all, to be able to fix a machine in a chaos of grease, sweat and paint. It had hurt Pavlov back then to see the shame the kid felt as he worked away underneath the upraised cars. He looked away when he saw Pavlov, and tried to erase the stains on his skin with a pitiful grimy cloth. He had wiped his hands, Pavlov remembered, and tossed the cloth towards the tool box. Pavlov had imagined the cloth as travelling dark matter, suspended between the kid and the smudged wall before eventually, inescapably, landing gracefully on the metal counter.

  But now a military uniform had wiped away all the grease, erased the sublime art of those grey traces. Perhaps the kid had joined the militia to remove the stain of his shame. War had provided him with a clean slate, a new beginning full of respect and order, opportunities. War had turned screws into bullets, snot into a moustache, stained sneakers into high boots, the evocative dirty calendar in his father’s garage into real-life conquests. The car jack in the kid’s hand had turned into an AK-47—it was still a mechanical object after all, and both cars and guns were complicit in modern-day death.

  Pavlov wondered if the kid had tried to kill him out of shame over his earlier, stained self, or because Pavlov had once witnessed him being beaten. T
hat day when Pavlov had visited the garage, the mechanic had beaten his son. He had pulled the kid’s ear and spanked him hard, leaving big smudges on the kid’s neck and buttocks. Perhaps this son of a mechanic blamed his father’s brutish ways on undertakers and their kind—ghosts who reminded him of humiliation and death. Maybe Pavlov’s presence at the window brought back memories of a father who had smeared grease on the doorknobs of the house with calloused, dirty hands that were bashed and bruised, with hammer-flattened nails. Perhaps the kid remembered the taste of grease in the family dinner, how engine lubricants had prevented domestic stability, how everything that had skidded and slid in the mechanic’s home could be blamed on the undertakers who watched from above with an air of detachment, perhaps even superiority. Perhaps the slaps that the kid’s father landed on his mother late at night, after smearing grease on clear bottles of booze and leaving the stains of his affection on the kid’s face, could be conveniently blamed on the family of undertakers and its watchful descendant; after all, these same undertakers had delivered the last remains of the mechanic’s life to the junkyard of crosses and death.

  To the young would-be assassin below, Pavlov knew, he must certainly have appeared like a ghost, an intrusive ghost from childhood, a mocking ghost who had witnessed the kid’s shame, a ghost unafraid of the flight of a bullet and the possibility of death. That day, all this son of the mechanic had to do was tilt his gun a little, just a fraction of an angle, and fire towards the image at the window.