Beirut Blues (13 page)

The Palestinians left the wilderness after an Israeli reconnaissance aircraft was seen circling above the village and the surrounding area on several occasions, acting on information received from a spy in our village, it was said at the time. My grandfather went to survey his territory joyfully, hurling the whitewashed stones which had been used to mark out the camp boundaries onto the rocks below. With my grandmother, he considered whether to plant fields there and cultivate the wilderness or to burn off the wooded slopes and leave them fallow for a time. But the village youths did not leave him undecided for long, as they occupied it one dawn, at the moment when the watchful eye dozes, confident that the night and its dark terrors are dispersing, because the first signs of morning and clarity are only a hair’s breadth away.

My grandfather rushed from the house, shouting, “I’ve been raped by my sons! I’ve been raped by my sons!”

He raced along, his shirt hanging over his trousers, and my grandmother ran after him, holding out his belt to him and crying, “A man without a belt has no restraint, and a man who runs gives the impression he has no sense and no dignity.”

When my grandfather saw Mustafa and the rest of the youths in the wilderness, a blood vessel burst in his eye.

“Mustafa? Abu Mustafa’s son?” he was shouting as he came around from the anesthetic. “His mother was packing fruit when she went into labor and they brought her to our house to give birth to this thug.”

He wouldn’t be quiet even though the doctor warned him that he’d burst another blood vessel.

He thought he had sorted the matter out with the young
men’s families, some of whom had promised to help and been extremely upset about what had happened, but their sons made plans to leave the wilderness and occupy the orchards: the idealists among them thought the orchards would be a source of income; then they would not need to be committed to any political party, individual or state, and the cash would enable them to start up a new party, independent of all the others. Meantime, my grandfather, who still had one eye bandaged, swore to have his revenge, not only on them but on you—the earth and the trees that had accepted another master. He vowed to set you alight, but he was like a little child crying in pain, and needed someone to calm him down all the time in the hospital; my grandmother and his brother only made things worse and he began to scream again, like the child refusing to play any of the games suggested to him. “An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth,” urged my grandmother. “We should form a militia. A gang of thugs—or fighters, as they call them—who look ferocious enough to make a lion stand up on its hind legs and beg for mercy.”

“A militia?” shouted my grandfather, overwhelmed. “Shooting and getting shot? What’s the matter with you? You’re the wisest, most sensible, most intelligent woman I know. How can you think about having a militia?”

“My body is on fire!” she screamed. “I feel as if somebody’s hung me up by the eyes on a fishhook. You think it’s reasonable for some thugs to push us off our land? Off our ancestors’ land? Reasonable that we should let godless people surround this house, whose walls have been purified by all the prayers I’ve prayed in it?”

“They’re all communists, with no religion, no breeding,” put in my great-uncle soothingly, “but a militia, Umm Fatima? Are we thugs too?”

“You’re right, we’re not,” she answered contemptuously, “but one has to change. If we protect our lands in the only way open to us and they call us thugs, then perhaps we are. If the politicians are, then, yes, so are we.”

The idea of starting up a militia had been like a seed planted in her heart in the earliest days of the war. She had watered it and slowly it had grown and matured. She stood there defiantly. “What do you say?” she demanded, deliberately addressing the question to my grandfather, because she knew that his brother would not give him any encouragement, and also because she felt, as she always had done, that the family consisted solely of her and my grandfather.

“Whom would you want to carry guns, my dear?” inquired my grandfather. “Abu Karki and his wife, Hussein, Abu Mustafa, father of the ringleader, or Fadil?”

We all burst out laughing, as my grandfather had chosen the oldest, the most decrepit, the most naïve of the local people, or else those who were still loyal to our family purely because their sons were abroad or in Beirut.

My grandmother stopped laughing abruptly, regretting her frivolity. “No. Do you think I’m so shortsighted and stupid? No, not at all. Did no one hear me saying that the militias were bullies and thugs who love the color of money and the taste of power? They’re vigilantes, bullies, but you just agree to what I’m saying and I guarantee you’ll have everyone under your feet like cockroaches.”

My great-uncle spoke this time, prepared for the storm
his words would provoke, but feeling there was only one solution to the problem and he would state it whatever happened: “You have to have an agreement with the family you won’t name.”

“My wife has gone mad, and it looks as if you have too,” said my grandfather, “but luckily I’m still sane. Drag our name through the mud for the sake of a lot of wild hooligans who’ve rebelled against their families because it’s time they got married?”

“It seems the years have played tricks with your mind,” remarked my grandmother to my great-uncle, not looking in his direction. Then, disregarding his proposal and returning to her original train of thought, she went through the families she knew who had militias. “Even the Albino has a militia. That makes about twenty in all.”

“So who have you got around here?” reiterated my great-uncle. “Listen! Talk to the family you won’t name and they’ll put some of their bandits at your disposal to protect your land. You won’t lose as much as an onion skin. On the contrary, you’ll stand to gain—when they’ve recovered your land for you, they’ll be glad to work with you.”

I don’t remember a time when we ever mentioned the name of the unnamed family. We called them the Birdseeds, the Shitshovelers, the Nasties, the Unmentionables, the Nameless.

The animosity towards this family was not because they smuggled hashish and cocaine (one of their sons had a degree in mechanical engineering from a leading university in the States, and when he came back, he designed a small wooden aircraft for the family to use for short runs into Syria). It was
because they had risen to prominence in the course of the war and had a lot of influence, although my grandparents did not publicly acknowledge their existence.

My grandfather could not forget how this family had expanded and become one of the richest in the area, when their forefathers had been reduced to living on their wits, transporting sand and gravel on their pack animals until, thanks to their shrewd instincts, they became big tobacco smugglers, graduating to hashish in the war. In no time at all they began to throw their money about, acquiring big American cars, new villas, and gilded furniture. They forbade their women to collect camel and cattle dung to feed the fire and actually gave up the outside oven and the tin sheets for bread baking when they had an asphalt path laid and planted flower beds on either side of it.

One of their sons married a much-married actress who had posed in a bathing suit with a bottle of perfume held up to her breasts and the caption “It’s good to be warm even in a heat wave.” Instead of criticizing them, local people admired them more than ever, proud that they came from the Bekaa, and were particularly impressed when the family became involved in politics, took hostages and kidnapped those who got in the way of their business activities. Bullies and vigilantes gathered around them, until eventually they had a militia protecting them, their routes, and their men, whose methods of communication with the outside world had begun to command the greatest respect. They had acquired walkie-talkies, and a private international telephone line stretching above the sunflowers and telegraph poles and running by the streams. They had even introduced new methods of preparing
hashish, processing it, and making it ready for shipment. All the young men in the village and the surrounding area had aspirations to join their circle, enticed by the private helicopter overhead, their Presley haircuts, the gold and diamond rings on their fingers, their genuine crocodile belts.

The confusion inside my grandmother’s head increased as she understood that, for the first time, she was powerless to act. When the armed men gathered and advanced right up to her boundaries, she hurried to visit the houses in the village, one by one, houses where she never set foot except when someone died or gave birth. It escaped her notice, she who never failed to notice even the color of someone’s eyelashes, that the people were scared of her visiting, scared that their children would be as rude to her as they had been to them. For they had already tried to persuade them to leave the land, either by shouting and threatening or by recounting stories of our family’s generosity in an attempt to bring them around and make them see the light. Their talk was weighed down with the past, unlikely to strike any chords with their children, who knew nothing of the time before the war, had learned about nothing but the different types of arms in circulation, wanted nothing but to dress in combat gear. Their families’ intervention only served to make the children more alienated, more irritated, for they had never understood why their parents were so well disposed towards a big landowning family like ours, and they accused them of fearing the past and continuing to be dominated by it.

My grandmother sent Naima out to reconnoiter and gleaned from her hesitant reports that the people would rather she visited them in the morning. My grandmother
swallowed as if her mouth were full of pins, recalling the past when she had never had to inquire about the best time to visit, because their houses were open to her all year round, and they were pleased at her interest in them. However, she smiled at Naima and said, “Never mind. The morning is a good time to go.”

She toured around listening to the echo of her words, for the rooms were almost bare except for cupboards and mattresses, and the pin-cushions and woven straw mats on the walls. She guessed that people were no longer as upset as they had seemed in the past when they heard that the land had been occupied, even though they cried in front of her and bent to kiss her respectfully on the shoulder, disowning their children or swearing to punish them, promising to do whatever they could. But my grandmother sensed that a change had occurred in these houses: it was the feeling of tranquillity, as if the parents had become subservient to their children. She reproached them for abandoning their authority.

She was wearing a dress she hadn’t worn for ages which was beginning to cut into her a little around the waist, but she loved the velvet trimming on the sleeves. Over it she wore the coat whose color had faded, but which she still liked all the same. She smelled of amber essence and had remembered to put a few drops on her prayer beads. Despair had no power over her: it was as if she had given her mind a protective coating, reinforcing it with arguments taken from history, from received wisdom, even from the daily papers, and it had started to creak because she had polished it so much. Her listeners were ill at ease, watching the door. My
grandmother began deliberately putting off leaving, deciding that she would get more out of the sons than from these evasive folk who swayed from side to side, tutting and repeating, “There is no power or strength except with God,” and “We can’t do a thing unless we put a knife to their throats! We’re willing to do it, we’d do anything for you.”

She finally stood up when Mustafa entered. He must have heard about her visit when he was in the orchard and have come, not to see her, but to make peace with his father, who had rejected him publicly from the minaret of the local mosque. My grandmother had pinned her remaining hopes on her final visit to Mustafa’s father’s house; despite his frail build, his eyes gave off sparks. Your trees only seemed to bear fruit when he touched them and your soil only responded to him watering it; however, the folk song which his father had bawled out as a kind of oath of allegiance to my great-grandfather was the sole reason he was as pliable as dough in my 2 grandfather’s hands.

My lord, O my lord

You are the cow and I am the fly

Consider me a fly under your tail

I’m going to keep a close watch on the peasants

Who see you as provider and protector

And tell you what they’re up to every day

And if you ever find I’m lying

Then you must beat me, beat me

Until I shit a mountain

And give up all my secrets.

Mustafa knew that only in my grandmother’s presence could he make an incursion into his father’s logic, if his father was to hear him having a discussion with her, blocking all her chances to make skillful interventions or use her powers of eloquence, and leaving her fumbling for words. As he spoke to her he was acutely conscious that he must not make the same mistake again: he was not going to open his heart to her and tell her, as he had told his father months before, that he wanted to be a guerrilla, to stand ready in combat gear, give orders, feel the heat of a weapon. Bruce Lee films were being acted out in your orchards and he was aware of it, but instead of fulfilling his ambitions, he was obliged to run errands for his mother, give her his blessing whenever she spat at the bands of youths, and go along with her as she emptied the bowl of dirty water after the wash and cursed them: “God willing, they’ll become like the black scum in that water.”

Mustafa said, “The fathers don’t understand the rage of their sons. Yes, they were in the orchards and so were the boys’ mothers, hoeing, planting, harvesting, and packing, while the sun beat down on their children all day long, and they were left to scream unattended when insects stung them. Wherever they looked, they saw land stretching to the horizon and knew that it all belonged to the blond man sitting in the hut, the one with a resounding laugh who rode around on horseback. Did he have a right to these lands simply because his grandfather imported wheat and slabs of ice to the villages during the First World War and took land in exchange when the people had no gold liras?”