Beirut Blues (12 page)

On this occasion we were not greeted by my grandfather’s
orchards as we had been in the past, but by a sign for Samira, Coiffeuse. “A hairdressing salon here!” I exclaimed. “Incredible!”

I could not imagine any of the women in the village having their hair done except Ruhiyya. I smiled at the thought of Ruhiyya with a cigarette in her hand and a cup of coffee on her lap.

“A chocolate factory! A bank! A chicken farm. A family restaurant. The Nabaa Café—Three Floors. Villas. Is this really our village? A bank. Another bank.”

“Do you put cotton wool in your ears?” answered Zemzem impatiently. “I told you before that a hairdresser’s had opened in the village, and when Kawakib went to get her hair done, the first time the hairdresser told her that there wasn’t any hot water, the second time she was making stuffed vine leaves, and the third time she said she was tired and couldn’t do it. And I told you that Hamad Jaafar got his money out of Kuwait and came and opened a factory, and his brother opened a restaurant, and they couldn’t believe their luck!”

I had heard it all before, but I couldn’t picture it: tables with cloths and a waiter with a pencil and paper, instead of one of the estate workers on the little patch of desert where we used to buy cucumbers, and melons which were still green.

“Half a kilo,” we used to shout, and he would put down his hoe and come over to us carrying a cucumber wrapped in newspaper or in a scrap torn from his bag of earth. I think I can still hear the flies buzzing, but it might be the hum of the machinery in the chocolate factory.

My grandmother clears her throat more and more frequently. She can’t look at her orchards for any length of time, while I can’t tear my eyes away from them. The trees have mostly died and the wildflowers no longer grow in such profusion. The color of the earth seems to dominate the other colors, then our house appears, and I hear the sound of the water cistern. I feel as if I have never left this place. Everything is as it always was. Naima runs out, followed by another girl, and my grandfather. The unknown girl examines us, then rushes off in the opposite direction and disappears. Everybody kisses us, my grandfather clasps me to his chest, lets me go, and kisses my grandmother’s hand, then holds me tightly again, and behind him I see the line of washing dancing in the breeze. The pine trees are as they were, the pear tree right beside the water tank. I free myself from his embrace and stretch up until I can see the tent on the roof, where one of his relations used to take his siestas and compose poetry, so we nicknamed him Abu Tammam.

The windows still appear to have no function and stand permanently open. I always used to compare them to the city windows, which were closed when it was cold or wet, and could never remember it raining in the village. Nobody ever looked out of these windows with their intricate wrought-iron bars. When a car horn sounded or tires crunched over the sand and gravel, we would rush to the wide-open door.

My grandfather puts his strong arms around me again. “You had me worried. You could have contacted me. Why didn’t you leave right at the beginning?”

Of course Zemzem seizes this opportunity for revenge and tells him that although she went on and on at us croaking
like a frog, it had not done any good, and when a rocket landed in the house, we had actually started to laugh and talked about hollowing it out and stuffing it with rice.

Now my grandfather is pulling me by the hand out beyond the house. The sun has set on your orchards. I hear voices and laughter coming from them and my heart gives a jolt of surprise. I breathe faster. In the middle of the orchard is a small stone building with a zinc roof. My grandfather points. “See the poison planted there.”

But I can see nothing except some unidentifiable plants, motionless in the darkness.

“See what they’ve planted. Poison and filth.”

“Even if they’ve planted apes and monkeys, who cares? They’ll soon be gone,” I say consolingly.

Then he starts cursing loudly, and when I implore him to be quiet, it seems to fuel his agitation. “Why should I be quiet?” he shouts. “So they’ll think I’m afraid? All I’ve got left is a voice. I just want to make them hear. What can they do? Kidnap me? They’ve already tried.”

When they hear him shouting, Naima and my grandmother come up to us and, without saying anything, try to drag him inside. He refuses to go and Naima gives vent to her feelings. “He’s like this every day. Morning, noon, and night. As if he has fits. I’m glad you’ve come to see with your own eyes what the old wretch is like, and how much we have to put up with from him.”

The porch gathers us in once more. All that is visible are the stars and the chain of high mountains. My grandfather sits down heavily, for he carries you on his back and in his heart. Then he looks about him and asks where Juhayna is.
“Juhayna! Juhayna!” he calls. He turns to me and, as if I’m a little girl, promises that she will be a pretty and intelligent companion for me. “Where have you gone, Juhayna?” he calls again. Then he mutters to himself, “She’s vanished like a jinn, God save us.”

When he was a boy he wanted to learn to read and write, even though his father and other members of his family had banded together to try to dissuade him. “Your family has everything and you want to sit down in front of a teacher who’ll order you about and tell you what to learn? The ‘a’ has nothing on it and the ‘b’ has a dot underneath it. Get servants who can read and write for you. Why go to all that trouble?”

But he insisted on having an education: the Ottomans and the French read newspapers and wrote with pens. He had seen them as they relaxed after hunting parties.

He began going on horseback to the sheikh’s school in the nearby town and his mother and aunt recited charms to protect him on the way. But when the time came for him to leave you and go to college in Beirut, he couldn’t do it. The little sparrows and the big birds of prey were the first to call him to you, and eventually my grandfather became an expert hunter like his father; but unlike him, he did not ride around as if he were lord of all he surveyed, ordering the horsemen and the beaters and their dogs to follow him. He didn’t prevent others in his party from shooting so that the local people would talk about the number of birds hanging from the master’s saddle, as they had done in his father’s day. He began instead to share this hobby of his with the men and youths of the village and anyone from round about who liked
to hunt. He went on hunting parties with the Ottomans and the French, until gradually he became aware that he was bound to you heart and soul. He drew life from you and expressed his concern for you with every breath, and came to discover that you, and not reading and writing, were the constant; you would stand firm in the face of disasters and crises, and the solutions to them would be in your hands. The villagers found themselves drawn to you. Their importance came from belonging to the person who owned you. You refused or accepted; roared in anger or gave your blessing, and you accepted my grandfather and allowed his roots to extend deep inside you.

You knew it was your duty to find him a bride, and you found her for him one day when he had gone for a long ride on horseback. My grandmother had cried until her father agreed to let her and her mother go out of the house with him, swathed in black from head to toe. He had waited until sunset so that no one would see him, and had chosen a remote spot where my grandmother sat on a rock talking silently to the departing sun, demanding to know why her father was so harsh and autocratic. She was a prisoner in the house; nobody heard her speak, not even the walls; nobody saw her except the women who came to bring her and her mother news of what was going on in the world and the neighboring villages. In the end she became famous as some kind of demon princess, invisible to all but her father and heaven. Time and time again she asked her father why he didn’t allow her to go to the female sheikh to learn to read and write, and he would reply that he didn’t want a living soul to catch a glimpse of her, for besides being a girl she
was his daughter. So she asked him why in that case he didn’t allow the sheikha to come to the house to teach her, as their family’s name was associated with religion in people’s minds, because it had dispatched its sons to learn the basics of Islamic law. To avoid being beaten conclusively by his daughter, he said he hadn’t known that the sheikha could read and write and thought she recited the Qur’an from memory, and in any case she only left her house for religious ceremonies. When his answers failed to achieve the desired effect, he finally admitted the truth: “I’m afraid you might read novels and stories, and learn to write letters.”

“Surely reading and interpreting the Qur’an correctly only teaches you how to be closer to God and His Messenger?”

My grandmother won, and books and writing became the most important things in her life, rather than women’s talk restricted to the tree producing fruit, or the cow miscarrying, or the latest wedding. She began studying late into the night, turning up the kerosene lamp, and discovered that being able to solve the riddle of words gave her power; she refused to eat sitting on the mat and put her food out on a little table. When her father threw his huge, worn-out shoes away, she rescued them and put them on and felt the power springing from them.

On my grandfather’s land, she lowered her eyes from the sky and fixed them on her father. She wept, saying she needed to see the sky and breathe the air every day, not just on rare occasions. But his thoughts were elsewhere, as he looked all around him, ensuring the spot he had chosen was quiet except for the sound of loneliness and the horse shifting
restlessly between the shafts of the cart which he had stopped on the level ground. When he was certain nobody could see his daughter, he heaved a sigh of relief. But there was someone there, and he was watching her. My grandfather could see part of her face as she spoke, and he sighed to himself, and fell in love with her.

My grandfather’s name eventually became known in Beirut, having become part of the fabric of the country like the Beydouns and Sursuqs and other families with areas named after them. His name was given to varieties of apples and pears and a new kind of fruit he produced by grafting an apple onto a guava. The feel of it was somewhere between the sweet smoothness of an apple and the rough porous texture of a quince, and it tasted like a mixture of orange flower water and cherries. I heard its name everywhere, especially on the lips of street vendors.

Although my grandmother traveled away from you, you had taken root in her, and so she only half gave herself to the city: one eye, nostril, hand. Everything connected with Beirut was temporary, or if not temporary, always peripheral.

She did not express her taste in furniture, as she did in clothes, and bought it haphazardly, remaining in the car and delegating Ali to buy whatever was available. She never tried to mix with her Beirut neighbors or even to accommodate to the city itself. We continued to live as if we were close to you, eating off an assortment of dishes with brass spoons which were turning rusty. We consumed large raw pieces of meat and offal, unconcerned about the liquid floating in the tureen and the flies hovering around the milk, sometimes falling in.

I adapted to Beirut in the same way as she did, but you were there in front of me every time I came home and saw wooden crates piled up in the entrance, or rode in Ali’s car and sat next to a box of eggs, a heap of slaughtered chickens, or a pail of milk.

As soon as the war spread outside the city, it penetrated right inside you, where you were moist and bursting with life, and when the seeds were fertilized, they produced the fires of battle.

The Palestinians were the first to occupy you, taking over a rocky, uncultivated area known as the wilderness, and my grandfather made sure that anybody with the remotest connection to the Palestinians knew how he felt about this. Eventually he went to the man in charge, who had been to visit him on a previous occasion to ask permission to use the area for maneuvers. My grandfather had refused, not because he feared it would give the Israelis an excuse to attack, but because he and my grandmother were possessive to the extent that if a bee or a butterfly moved onto one of their trees, they believed the creature automatically became their property. They wanted everyone, even the cattle, to know that a particular stone marked the beginning of their land, and not a single cow would reach its head out over this boundary to graze. There was no barbed-wire fence or wall surrounding you. Anyone was free to look at you, but there was a solid mental boundary which sent an electrifying quiver through those who crossed it intending harm. The fear was not of the two of them, but of all they had: the house, the trees, the car and its driver, the house in Beirut and the guests who called on them; the pilgrimages to Mecca and the holy places, the
prayer beads they had brought back from Mount Arafat, the water from the sacred well of Zemzem; and the limitless supplies of food which appeared to be the source of their power.

My grandfather began making for the “wilderness” to observe the fedayeen night and day as they carried out imaginary operations, rolling down the slopes, taking cover, practicing firing, and letting out exuberant cries as they roasted a snake for their evening meal. He used to imitate them dancing, waving his hands in the air and bringing them down to his sides, and produced a centipede from a jar and went through the motions of biting it in front of them. He would ask them from a distance, “What do you want? How many liras to see the back of you?”

He had no faith in politics or the struggle, and they finally lost patience with him, for every time he heard a shot he would call out, “It sounds as though somebody’s had too many beans.”

If you were my grandfather’s reason for living, then mankind was my grandmother’s. It was not that she loved her fellow human beings, but she felt that she derived her lifeblood from dominating them. When she lost the wilderness, it was as if she had lost the wings which enabled her to fly. She tried to preserve a certain permanent image of herself, my grandfather, and his ancestors in the Palestinians’ eyes by convincing my grandfather that he should agree to lend them the wilderness, even curry favor with them, so that when she sat cross-legged in gatherings, she could say carelessly, as if waving away a fly, “We gave them charity, so they have to do as we say.”