Beirut Blues (2 page)

In front of the mirror I lifted my hair off my neck with one hand and smiled, then I raised my breasts with my other hand and smiled again, as if I were facing a camera lens or a man were looking at me. But I was alone with the broken mirror and the sound of my grandmother’s prayers drifting in through the open door. She was praying to God to protect me as I made the crossing into the eastern sector of the city. She was afraid for me, and I was nervous too, not only of crossing over to the east but because I was meeting you. My uneasiness was still there the next day and I longed more than anything to wear the lace dress to give me courage as I crossed the sand and dead leaves to the other side, but when it came to it, I folded it up and put it in an overnight bag.

I found fault with the way you moved and sat and talked. You were either insensitive or stupid. When you tried to be
one of us again, the dominant expression on your face was pity, for everyone who’d stayed here. As you talked you clasped people to you, then touched their faces, then held them again as if you were saying, “I know what you’re suffering.” Why were you so sure that those who stayed were the only ones suffering?

The wedding ended and everyone said they hoped we’d soon find husbands. For the second time that evening, I said laughing that Jummana and I ought to marry one another. A woman remarked, “You’re right. Where can you find normal men here? They’re all crooks or fighters. The rest have left, or don’t have a penny to their name.”

Instead of going off somewhere with you to talk about what had happened during our time apart, I remained firmly in my seat, rejoicing that I hadn’t gone back with the convoy of cars headed for the western sector. Those who had decided to risk the journey back at night couldn’t possibly have enjoyed the festivities to the full.

I was happy to sit on the balcony listening to the crickets singing in the woods, a sound I’d never expected to hear again in my life, while the fireflies played blindman’s buff among the trees. I sighed and Jummana understood why and responded with a sigh of her own. Without saying anything, we thought simultaneously that the easterners were the lucky ones because they had the mountains as well. You appeared to be rooting around for topics of conversation, and dismissing them as soon as they occurred to you, perhaps realizing they’d be of no interest because they were so remote from life here.

I put the blame on the noise and crowds surrounding us
at the wedding, and the constant interruptions: “How did we lose touch?” “How do we manage to live in West Beirut?”

A relative of yours remembered me and told me I should be married by now. To my astonishment you agreed with her. “You ought to visit me in Belgium. You’ll be fighting off Lebanese men, there are so many of them there.”

I wonder if you were lying to spare my feelings or really didn’t know that the men who come back to visit Lebanon are either in their coffins or actively looking for someone to marry. When I stared into your face, I knew for sure I hadn’t missed you. Was it your ballet-type shoes with blue flowers stuck on the front, or your blue dress which made you look like a girl in one of Gauguin’s paintings? We couldn’t be close when we lived such completely different lives, starting with your shoes, which wouldn’t have survived more than a few steps over the uneven sidewalks and quagmires of mud. And that was just your shoes! So what about the expressions on your face which said clearly that your leaving the country meant the war had ceased to exist? If we had rubbed your nose in it, you would have acknowledged its existence, but said it couldn’t be helped if a few people had to live through it and be harmed by it. With the second glass of arrack, I noticed I was enjoying the glances I was getting from your relations and especially from your brother’s friends. There was one who was more handsome than the others. He was improvising poems to entertain the guests, and every time he finished a verse he smiled at me.

It was Jummana rather than you who laughed and came to my aid: our thoughts have begun to coincide without any need for us to speak, just the way it used to be with you and
me. You hadn’t changed like this before, not even the year you came back married; in fact, marriage seemed to make you extra responsive to admirers, as if you didn’t like the idea that a page of your life had been turned for good. And yet there you were, obviously annoyed by my antics with Jummana.

Your mother intervened, laughing. “Keep your eyes off the girls, you rascal! I know what you’re up to!”

He looked into my eyes, and I felt he was kissing me, holding me close, in spite of the table between us loaded with plates and glasses and flowers. “No, honestly, it’s Sitt Yvette I want.”

Everyone laughed. Do you remember when we were children, Sitt Yvette used to promise to make us a cake whenever I went into her shop with you? Sitt Yvette laughed and held out her glass, a piece of parsley stuck between her teeth. “Here’s to you and all the young men like you.”

“Knock it back, Sitt Yvette, and I’ll give you a kiss.”

She drank it in one go and covered her face with her hands. It struck me then that the great divide really existed: I couldn’t imagine this relaxed atmosphere in the western sector, in the city or the countryside, and the hopes for change seemed to have receded. Perhaps if the war hadn’t happened, we’d have had more chance.

I returned to the table. His warmth brought me back, his eyes saying to me, “Let me take you under the olive trees and kiss you.”

I no longer looked him in the eye. I began to feel embarrassed every time he opened his mouth to recite a verse, even though the females in his poems were always in the plural.

The newlyweds have gone tonight and left me with the pearls

My heart beats faster, but I tell it to be still.

You could have had those pearls

And now they’re lost to you forever.

I wished I could cling to him under the trees, rest my head on his chest, and say to him, “My heart’s beating too. If you hold my hands, I’ll faint. Has it been a long time? Yes, ages since anyone stared at me and flirted with me like this. And even longer since anybody invited me to the movies or a restaurant by the sea to walk and talk and be frivolous. Here there are movie theaters and restaurants on the seafront, but tomorrow I have to cross back into the west, or if not tomorrow the day after, or in a week at the most. To tell you the truth, I don’t feel as if I’m in my own country. I’m a tourist. It’s too late. But I didn’t always think like this. There were times before when I used to say the war had given some meaning to my life. Now I realize that it’s too late. I can’t open my heart to you. Just for one night? It’s not because you’re a Christian, but because tomorrow we’ll be separated, and you won’t be in a hurry to visit the western sector. Perhaps you’ve convinced yourself that I’m from here, because you’ve been drinking and I’m a friend of Hayat’s, and probably like me and Hayat, you don’t think of yourself as being from the east or the west. But I’ve grown full of suspicions. People are changing before my eyes. People I used to know when they were students have become professors and gone backwards a hundred years. They’ve taken sides. The time may come when I do the same! Who knows? Perhaps then I’ll be happy. Belonging to some faction, however
extreme or outlandish, might be preferable to this. If you make a commitment, however hard the consequences turn out to be, you can relax. The fanatic meets a lot of others like him, people he can operate with. Where I come from, they hate everyone from your sector, even the men at the checkpoint. But I always want to have a chat with them, make them laugh and flirt with me. I seem to need reassurance and affection from your people. I want things to be like they were years ago. But now I’m drunk. All I want now is to rest my head on your chest.”

His eyes bored into me, but thinking about what I would say in response to them made me miserable for a few moments, then I felt the warmth in his voice again, and admired his teeth which were revealed each time he laughed and joked with Yvette: “I’d give anything to hold your hand, to kiss you on the mouth. No, on second thoughts, maybe you’ve got no teeth. Okay, on the cheek.”

“If you feel like it, you can have a nice whiff of meat,” she replied. “Come on! I’ve been pounding meat for kibbeh since early morning.”

Everyone burst out laughing at her reply and the boy was encouraged to take this humorous flirtation further, so he asked her to have another drink with him. He held a full glass to her lips but she pushed it away. “My teeth are hurting me and my throat’s burning.”

He plucked a piece of ice from the glass, but she moved her face out of reach, still laughing. “For Saint Maroun’s sake, please, my throat’s burning!”

“Look, Saint Maroun’s asleep now,” he answered. “See,
he’s got his eyes shut. So would you if you had to stand up all the time.”

Saint Maroun? I realized the illuminated statue down below us, which I had always thought was Christ, must be their Saint Maroun.

“Saint Maroun!” You drew in your breath, remembering. “I was so afraid of him! My grandmother, Umm George, used to threaten me with stories of what he’d do to me if I didn’t drink up all my milk!”

Suddenly I felt a longing for the old Hayat, but I was distracted by the sight of a building which looked like a white silkworm at the statue’s feet. “Is that the hospital attached to Saint Maroun’s convent?” I asked eagerly.

When someone told me it was, my heart sank. “Poor Fadila,” I whispered.

It must have come out louder than I thought, for Hayat’s mother asked, “Poor who?”

Enthusiastically, as if I’d been waiting for the opportunity to express my silent thoughts, I burst out, “Fadila’s mother’s in Saint Maroun’s Hospital.” I had already guessed what was going on in the others’ minds: “Fadila. That’s an old-fashioned peasant name. Muslim.”

Yvette asked curiously, “And her family’s there in West Beirut with you?”

“They’re always crossing over and visiting her here,” I said.

Inevitably Fadila cut straight through the noise and the handsome youth’s disturbing glances and was there with me.

I had an image of her in her high-heeled gold sandals,
with her pale complexion and the black aba thrown around her shoulders, begging me to let her come with me to the east, punctuating her words with movements of her plump hands and cracking the chewing gum between her teeth. I don’t know how she manages to appear in front of me every time I decide to visit my friends on the other side, urging me to take her with me so that she can see her mother. I refuse, and this only makes her more insistent. I offer excuses and she doesn’t listen, only groans and beats her breast, reproaching herself for not visiting her mother enough. She can no longer control the fear and agitation she feels when she travels alone in the eastern sector. Once she told us how, on a previous visit, she had opened a box of baklava and offered one to the taxi driver in an attempt to stop herself feeling scared, but he refused, saying, “
Merci.
No thanks.”

She searched for the pack of cigarettes she’d bought especially for the trip to make her look like a woman with power, and began blowing out smoke and coughing furiously. Then instead of cursing the devil as she normally did when she coughed, she began cursing Amal and Hizbullah, the Party of God, trying to involve the taxi driver. “I ask you, have you ever heard of anyone but us starting up a political party for the Lord?”

When the taxi driver didn’t reply, she set about opening up a plastic bag, checking to see that her black aba was still stuffed in at the bottom, and took out a box of chocolates, which she offered, only to be refused again. She told herself that he must think they were poisoned, and he was right to be wary, because the two of them belonged to opposite sides of a divided city, which meant they were enemies and at war
with each other, and stories of spies operating between the two sides were on the increase. She was nervous and uncertain how to behave. She held out the pack of cigarettes, and when he reached out a hand to take one, she relaxed a little, but her fear returned when she suddenly realized that she could no longer hear the sound of car horns and that there was no other car in sight on the bumpy road. So she began describing the suffering which the people in the western sector were encountering in their daily lives, nearly weeping with fright, and because the driver’s only response was a brief shake of the head, she began telling him again how much she liked and trusted the Christians, how she’d refused to put her mother anywhere but Saint Maroun’s Hospital, regardless of the cost, which had risen to thirty dollars a day, or the distance, or the difficulty of crossing from the west into the east. “The hospitals in the western sector are chaos. They’re all crazy there!”

The driver put his foot down and she was convinced he was about to kill her. He would tear her limb from limb and throw the pieces into a ditch. She’d rather he raped her if that was what he wanted. She’d let him do whatever he liked with her, but not kill her. To break the silence and try to calm her fears, she said imploringly, “If only I lived here. I’d be respected and properly treated. This is how life should be. Not like it is with us.”

To her horror, the driver suddenly struck the steering wheel with all his force, threw his cigarette out of the window, heaved a great sigh, and almost swerved off the road. “Give me a break!” he shouted. “Life’s shit there and it’s shit here.”

All the same, Fadila didn’t relax completely until she recognized the hotel where the beauty queens used to stay, which was near the hospital. She thanked him for being so kind and helpful before she got out of the car, and again offered him a piece of baklava, a chocolate, a cigarette. “At least you’ve still got Samadi’s patisseries over there,” he said.

“Give me your address,” she replied, bursting with affection. “Next time, I’ll bring your wife the biggest box of baklava they’ve got, though nothing would be enough to repay your kindness, and your people are protecting my mother and guarding her as if she was one of your own.”