Beirut Hellfire Society

by Rawi Hage

  Now Pavlov smiled as he stood his ground. If the young man had killed him, no one would mourn, question or care. Pavlov’s family of undertakers had never been held in high regard. And naturally, there was always humour in the death of an undertaker. The story of his own father’s death—how his father’s remains had fallen into the pit that he was digging—had become a joke in the community. Everyone saw the irony and no one held back their mockery. They should have left him there and saved themselves the trouble, people said. If he had known, he would have brought a measuring tape, other malicious mortals said. Some burials are quick and done at a discount…

  Pavlov looked the fighter in the eye and stood his ground. Of the twenty-one ceremonial bullets that had been fired into the air, only one had gone in Pavlov’s direction. Pavlov, in defiance, remained at the window, looking down at the fighters lifting their rifles and counting backwards as they fired once more. He had adopted the way of a dog and made a point of never showing fear or hesitation in moments of pain or danger.

  The son of the mechanic could have adjusted his aim for a better shot. But the kid was indecisive about a second tilt of the gun. This was why Pavlov understood the shot to be a warning. After all, who would dare to kill a person who belonged to the race of earth-diggers, casket-makers, carpenters of doom, breeders of worms, depositors of bones, people who lived so intimately close to the dead with their hovering ghosts? Ghosts, Pavlov thought, could be scared, booed away, exorcised—but not killed and never fully buried. They hovered in the middle somewhere, suspended between two planes, and that was perhaps why the kid must have hesitated to aim once more towards the window and kill him.

  Once, when Pavlov was a boy, his small soccer team had lost a game. After the match, as Pavlov was coming out of the bathroom, one of the other kids had come up to him and said that he should never have been allowed to join the team because he was a bad omen. This kid had pushed him to the ground and four other boys stomped on him and threw him against the edge of the pissing wall. One of them started to shout, Bury him! The others repeated, Bury him.

  The son of the mechanic had been there. He stood nearby and watched silently, without participating—maybe because he was on the other team. Pavlov remembered opening his bloody mouth at the son of the mechanic, who ran away in horror, a grease stain on his shoes.

  Now, after the militia had finished firing and carried their comrade’s coffin to its grave, Pavlov stepped away from his window. He walked down the stairs and crossed to the cemetery gate. Inside the graveyard, he stood at the edge of the freshly dug pit and faced Son of Mechanic. And watched silently as this fighter, bewildered, struggled to hold back his tears.

  THE PRIEST’S FRAGMENTS

  One morning in late June, Pavlov, still in his pyjamas and slippers, rushed along the street to get his French Gitanes Maïs cigarettes before the grocery’s metal doors, in deference to the impending passage of death, rolled down with the speed of a guillotine.

  The grocer was sitting outside his store with a pack of men. Pavlov hurried inside, thinking the grocer would follow, but instead the fellow jumped up and locked the metal door on him, to the amusement of the men on the sidewalk. Pavlov was captive. He stood in darkness, confined to the company of vegetables, glass bottles of soda, packs of cigarettes and chocolates, and other familiar groceries: his favourite sweets, forbidden to him by his dentist; the detergent he used to have to carry back to his mother; the thick, embarrassing sanitary pads his sister once flashed him with from under her high-waisted underwear; the indispensable batteries that made the barking radios of war multiply and jingle, carrying breaking news while the city ground to a halt, that loquacious pause—and here he was in the dark, the only source of light a candle beneath a statue of the Virgin Mary with warm toes, feeding a child under her long blue robe, probably from a bottle of lukewarm water mixed with dried milk, and helping herself to the stack of diapers on the shelf above her, calmly rocking her angelic baby to the motion of the flickering flame. Pavlov’s mother had often complained about the quality of the grocer’s vegetables, and Pavlov himself had never approved of buying onions or garlic, or even the deep-red beets, because to his mind these were roots, and anything that had been buried underground should never be eaten.

  He helped himself to two packs of his favourite cigarettes and a lighter, and when at last the grocer lifted the metal door, he faced the men on the sidewalk cracking jokes. One of them asked, Was it dark enough for you in there? How does it feel to be buried?

  Pavlov calmly opened the pack of cigarettes, pulled out a smoke and lit it. He stood there eyeing the men, who were still laughing at him. Then he flicked the cigarette to the side of the road and grabbed one of the men by the collar. He lifted this man above his own head and suspended him in the air. The man began to scream, and his laughter and everyone else’s ceased.

  The grocer rushed towards Pavlov and begged him not to hurt the man. Pavlov lifted the man higher. Early on, he had learned from his father how to lift a corpse from the ground and deposit it in the back of the hearse. Now, he was perfectly composed as he lifted this living man. The other men stood unmoving, taken aback. Then, one after the other, they mumbled polite apologies and asked him to remain calm. Pavlov deposited the man on the roof of a nearby car, turned to face them and lit another cigarette.

  There was silence as the man slowly clambered down from the car’s roof. And in that moment of silence Pavlov decided that humans deserved their burials, their darkness and their extinction.

  * * *

  Over the next few weeks, the funeral processions under Pavlov’s window alternated between those arranged for fighters who had been killed and those for civilians whose mourners hurried along the burial road in fear of falling bombs.

  The remaining priest walked the road multiple times each day, repeating the same prayers, swinging his incense, which evaporated to make superfluous clouds shaped like pharaonic dogs and chariots carrying dead warriors. His companion, the dead priest, had been decimated by the bomb; his remains had been gathered in plastic bags and given to Pavlov’s brute uncles to preserve until the clergyman’s head could be located. But no one had been able to find that head yet.

  On the day of the bomb, Pavlov had gone back to his balcony to retrieve the shoe, the toes and the ankle, with its heel, that had landed there. All these had belonged to the priest. He had lifted the ankle by the heel—Achilles’ heel, he had thought. And then he’d repeated his joke out loud. A piece of broken tibia was sticking out, and a blood clot had already thickened and dotted the skin like measles. Pavlov noticed that the priest had tied the laces of his shoe in an X pattern, not the more sophisticated horizontal lines. Neglect, he murmured to himself. And an orphan, he deduced. The priest must have been a poor child who had learnt that life could go sideways all on his own. The diagonal X had survived the blow, though the front of the shoe was wide open and resembled a gaping fish that had lost its ocean, a pleading, quacking duck in the grip of a butcher, a panting dog, a feeding whale. This openness caused Pavlov to reflect, and more images came to his mind: open fields, open seas, open caskets, open thighs…He examined the shoelaces once more, firmly pulled and firmly tied. This headless priest had never learned how to properly lace a shoe, Pavlov concluded. And he must have been cautious, ever fearful that he would step on a loose lace and trip and fall into the burial pit. Pavlov sighed and shook his head. Knots were to be taken seriously, and those who knew how to use knots in battles and at sea had a better chance to conquer, advance and glide into the sunset, or the fortune of dragging their enemies’ corpses behind their chariots.

  All these years, Pavlov had never talked to the dismembered priest. It had been the still-living priest who came often to his father’s business to collect the rent on the burial land, and to discuss ceremonies and other special arrangements for maintenance, digging and burial space. The now-headless priest, on the other hand, had not been mercenary. He had been more of an introvert, and consequen
tly said little. People preferred him because he was laconic, which gave him an aura of contemplation and piety. The headless priest had also had the better singing voice, and he was handsome with his green eyes, his fair skin and his straight hair. Women loved him and sought his counsel. As a result, the line for confession had often been uneven between the two priests. The women confessed everything and anything to the headless priest except their love for him.

  Once, in an Easter church procession, Pavlov had followed along behind the pagan re-enactment of the Virgin Mary weeping over the crucified Jew. Pierre, his cousin, had played a Roman soldier, holding a whip and lashing it at Jesus, who was dragging a wooden cross. Salwa the hyena, dressed in white, had followed her brother, her laughs muffled by the loud singing of the congregation. Suddenly, in a fit of madness, she had rushed at the green-eyed priest and thrown herself at his feet, grabbing his thighs, feeling his legs, screaming and wailing. She was hauled away by her father, Mounir, who dragged her behind the church wall. There he gave her a beating, until a few women rushed over to stop him, begging him to be calm and to forgive. They threw their bodies at him and held his hands away from his daughter. Then a few men ran over and pulled Mounir away.

  Now, as the search for the priest’s green-eyed head continued, the Christians in the city were petitioning to canonize him and honour his miraculous disappearance as well as his earlier acts of forgiveness and altruism. But the head of the priest was a prerequisite for the canonization request. A wandering soulless head was in conflict with the Church’s teachings; to leave a body and a heart wandering without a mind was to court lust, debauchery and uncontrolled emotions. A heart without a head could easily fall into a life (or afterlife) of romantic pursuits and self-destructive behaviour.

  And what if the devil had got hold of the priest’s head, as Pavlov fancied? He might well be performing sacrilegious acts, such as kidnapping Europa while she was bathing, seducing Helen of Troy on a trip to Paris, converting Hellenic Zeus to fascism or monotheism.

  The problem of the missing head presented a theological dilemma for the locals, and thus a contingent with good hearts were dispatched to search every corner of every street. They even went up to Pavlov’s roof with keys he had provided. He listened to their aimless steps above him. His father had once kept pigeons on the roof, but recently Pavlov had cut the throats of three of them, plucked them, cooked them, eaten them and shared the leftovers with Rex the dog. The rest he had liberated and watched as they slowly migrated towards the trees of the cemetery before disappearing for a few days—although some of them, regardless of the killing, had returned.

  Naturally, rumours spread that it was Pavlov who had hidden the head. If he could keep the left foot of the priest in his possession before handing it to the mournful congregation, why not the head? The head of a potential saint is a valuable thing to keep! Just imagine the conversations one might have with a bodiless priest. Imagine the theological arguments one could engage in, or the confessions, the wealth of confessions to disclose, a whole lexicon of debauchery and deceit, fear and regrets, petty stories of guilt and repentance.

  Pavlov smiled at this. He imagined that such a head could, like Medusa’s, turn a man into stone.

  In any case, the priest’s head was never found, and by July he was buried without it.

  NADJA AGAIN

  One night when the bombs were falling again, Pavlov took the stairs down to the street. He thought he might visit Nadja.

  As he descended, a flickering light filled the stairwell of his house and the smell of incense floated up to him, reminding Pavlov of those small chapels he had been obliged to attend during his school days. When he reached the bottom step, he saw the Lady of the Stairs. Burning candles were everywhere—on the ground at the edge of the stair rail, on wooden boxes, and a trail of candles led all the way to the door. Pavlov paused for a moment. He asked the lady if she had gone out and bought these candles, but the lady just curled up where she sat, and hummed, and didn’t look at him. He looked around for matches but could not see any of the telltale little sticks. He gently reached for the lady’s hand, opened her fingers and smelled her palm—but there was no trace of fire or wood. He looked around again, this time for a lighter, but found nothing. At last, he left the lady and her candles, and started towards Nadja’s place.

  Pavlov walked all night. He went down the hill of Achrafieh, took the French stairs, passed the neighbourhood of Mar Mikhael and went straight towards the bridge, then crossed into the periphery of Bourj Hammoud. There, he traced his steps from the falafel place and found his way to the murder scene of the hooker and her pimp. He knocked, and Nadja opened the door. She recognized him and smiled.

  He sat in her kitchen, and she offered him food. For a while, as he ate, they sat in silence.

  Then Nadja spoke. Sometimes, people have no need to explain, talk or justify, she said. I like your silence. She touched his face. Do you want to stay?

  Yes, he said.

  Did you shower?

  He shook his head, walked to her room and lay on her bed.

  She laughed, and followed him.

  That night, in Nadja’s arms, he felt sad. He thought of the Lady of the Stairs and her candles, and of the mystery of the many fires in his home. At last, he fell asleep.

  The next morning, he woke early, carefully liberated himself from Nadja’s embrace, got dressed and went looking for the bathroom. The apartment was chopped up into small rooms and access to the bathroom was at the end of a tunnel-like corridor. The closed doors stood firm, guarding memories of lubricant, semen and single soft tissues drawn from a box by the bed.

  The bathroom had a standing shower made of turquoise tiles separated by Cartesian lines that must have once glowed in their whiteness. All the towels looked wet and heavy, so Pavlov contented himself with whipping water from his palm against his face and then against his thighs. On the way back down the corridor he passed one of the ladies, who was groaning to herself over a cup of tea.

  He remembered leaving his watch at the side of the bed, so re-entered Nadja’s room on tiptoe, thinking to leave her some change—but Nadja was awake and watching him. In her morning voice, her eyes squinting, she told him not to bother. He had turned to go when he heard her speak again, with her French accent, asking why he hadn’t wanted her to take off her clothes, why he didn’t touch her.

  Pavlov paused and looked back at Nadja, but didn’t answer. He left without a word.

  He walked back across the bridge and up the hill to the cemetery road. When he arrived at his house, the candles at the entrance had burned down. The wax had dripped and splattered and stretched with exhaustion, melting and surrounding the Lady of the Stairs, who was sound asleep.

  REX

  One early August morning as birds flew over the cemetery, leaving droppings on the crosses and stones, gliding past what was left of the early morning moon and chirping warnings to extraterrestrials who had dodged behind the lunar dune when the Americans had landed there, Pavlov made his way across the road to feed Rex, the dead warrior’s dog. As he did so, he heard what sounded like an animal’s cry coming from inside the cemetery. He jumped the fence and walked towards the noise, which alternated between small yelps and loud moaning. Slowly, he approached a large rock that stood at the far edge of the cemetery. His cousin Salwa was on her knees, her open palms flat on the ground, her knees mud-stained, the tips of her shoes slightly curved inwards and digging at the earth, her skirt raised, her blouse half-open, rocking back and forth in time to the young militiaman who had once aimed his rifle and shot at Pavlov’s window.

  Upon seeing Pavlov, the young man stopped his thrusting, but his cousin turned and looked up at him, slapping the boy’s thigh repeatedly in the manner of a jockey on a racing horse, and Son of Mechanic proceeded with his fucking, oblivious once more to Pavlov’s gaze. Salwa looked Pavlov straight in the eye and shrieked her loud laugh.

  Pavlov turned and walked back towards the fence, climbed
it and jumped down. His flight was not as graceful as that of Tariq the young fighter who had flown down to his death from the hotel, and the dog, who was waiting outside the fence, whimpered.

  Pavlov recalled the day the bomb decimated the funeral procession, and how his cousin’s laugh had caused him to walk over and slap her hard. She must already have had the son of the mechanic at her disposal. He was probably willing to do everything she asked—perhaps even kill a spectator watching from a window. What a man won’t do from lust, thought Pavlov. Romantic love! Pavlov laughed at the thought, and Rex howled. Even Zeus, the son of Cronos, the God of Thunder, had been driven by Hera to take the Achaean side. And why not help the hyena take revenge? he asked the dog. I was the one who tried to stop her from laughing, that day of the bomb. But I was wrong. In fact, why not laugh? Laughter should be permissible under all circumstances, he now solemnly declared, and Rex nodded.

  And why not laugh? the dog repeated. I blame those Semitic gods and their austere, sombre, humourless ways, Rex said. We canines, in ancient Egypt, were once revered as caretakers to the Gods. We were the custodians of the dead. And Rex laughed a human laugh.

  Pavlov was reminded of his father’s laughter, his sense of humour in the company of the dead. When Pavlov was a child, his father would take him to the morgue and show him the etiquette of knotting ties and the art of tying shoelaces. A tie, his father had preached one such day, should be tightened firmly around the neck, but a shoe knot can be left loose. The fellow is not going anywhere.