Beirut Blues (20 page)

I am behaving now exactly as my mother behaved when one of her friends took my grandfather seriously and began to make plans, in the belief that nothing could be easier than dominating a man who cracked jokes and laughed as he did, and had a daughter with a similar affliction. What the friend didn’t know was that my mother had eyes as sharp as a hawk. Now I want to find him another woman whom I can control, which is exactly what my mother set out to do. I must keep my eyes open, get hold of the girls in the village, and pick one who, if nothing else, has freshness and youth in common with Juhayna.

For my grandfather has grown accustomed to the fragrance of a moist, dewy mouth. He won’t be satisfied with pinching flesh which is not soft and juicy, as he used to be in the past, or paying compliments to a mouth containing gaps and gold fillings. I know that it would only take a new female joining the household to make him happy again, even if he had to content himself with watching her talking, walking, and doing her work. Before Juhayna he used to like to joke with a new girl, maybe pinch her, and play cat and mouse, but Juhayna corrupted him, and we must teach him to play harmless games again.

Juhayna consciously exploits her hair and figure, making their presence felt in every room and every nook and cranny. Her voice is omnipresent; it trembles in the air around us and
permeates everything we do, even weaving itself into our pillows at night. She washes her hair and dries it in the sun, and it looks like shining falls of honey. She washes her clothes very carefully and slowly, and as she rubs them she’s reminding us that they’ll be on her body as soon as they’ve dried in the sun. She hangs them out as if to say, “These are my clothes. This is me hanging free in the sun and wind so the old man can touch me and desire me.”

The sound of her footsteps and the echo of her voice batter our senses constantly. The smacking and cracking as she chews her gum reverberates in our ears and fills us with bitter thoughts. She has no inhibitions about turning the taps on full, as if she’s saying to us in the rush of water, “I’m free. I don’t care about anybody or anything.”

I know my task is difficult, like my mother’s before me. She managed to persuade the woman we knew as “Masabhi’s wife” to agree not only to come to the house but to smile at my grandfather, let him flirt with her and accept his gifts. My mother wouldn’t have chosen her if she hadn’t been sure that there would be instant benefits: my grandfather would forget Layla, who wanted to make him forget himself and his family, while Masabhi’s wife was like a rose on top of a pyramid of thorns or a pressed flower in a book, addicted to the thrill of fear which went through her at the thought of her husband. I never knew her first name and still think of her only as Masabhi’s wife.

I know it’s difficult; it’s not just a question of choosing the most suitable candidate—find another girl, and that’s it. There won’t be another like Juhayna, for Juhayna is as rare as Lolita. In case you don’t know, Grandmother, Lolita was
a child who saw the desire in a man’s eyes and played with it. She chewed it like a piece of gum and sucked all the sugar out of it, then blew a bubble with it and popped it and rolled it in her fingers, playing with it and watching it disintegrate in her hand. That’s what Juhayna wants to do, so that she can eat cookies, as Ruhiyya said. Not only cookies, but the occupied land, the house, and even our souls.

My task is difficult because you know that there are no longer streams of girls as there were in the past, desperate to work in houses to escape the monotony of tending the fruit trees.

When you asked them to leave the land and come up into the house to help Naima, they were delighted and thought their luck was in. To them the house was like an enchanted castle. It had cool water in an earthenware pitcher; the aroma of meat grilling floated down to them as they worked in the sun, and they heard the radio playing and the boss laughing on the shady porch. But now, if they don’t fancy working with hashish and opium, they can go to the maternity hospital run by women who will train them to become nurses, or the schools and institutes set up by the Iranian embassy, who have begun to distribute free notebooks with Imam Khomeini on the cover, and there are the Islamic cooperatives and pharmacies and all the other businesses run by the young men of Hizbullah.

Before Juhayna, you declared confidently to us that his liking for other women wasn’t serious, otherwise you wouldn’t have moved to Beirut. When my mother married again, you had me to live with you in your house there, where you’d rarely spent more than a week at a time in the
past. You sensed a germ of intelligence in me and realized that the fact that I didn’t do better at school could have been due to the abnormal atmosphere at home. In fact, there were two atmospheres pulling against each other, with me in the middle: my father’s praying on one side, my mother’s singing on the other, and if they were in agreement over the act of weeping, they disagreed on the reasons. My father wept out of fear of God every time he lay facedown on the prayer mat, and my mother because the film she’d been watching hadn’t turned out the way she wanted.

Nobody knows if your move to Beirut was just for my benefit or for yours as well. As time passed, I began to understand why you visited the village less and less often. You grew to like city life. Everything you did was of such delicacy that it appeared to be wreathed in drifting smoke. You woke up in the morning, reveling in your bed, which looked as if you hadn’t slept in it, unlike the violent turmoil of the bed you shared with my grandfather. Even your pillow appeared untouched. You did your ablutions, prayed, and drank your tea before I got up, and I marveled at the calm enveloping the house.

You rose full of pleasure in the morning and I heard you addressing the sun or the clouds from your window. Then you looked in the mirror and murmured to yourself, “Perhaps I didn’t sleep well. My eyelids are swollen.”

You fetched a bottle of rose water, poured some onto a clean piece of gauze, and placed it over both eyes and lay down. “Bless the Prophet and his descendants. Rose water is fragrant, like the gardens of Paradise,” you murmured.

Afterwards you went around the house as if you were
walking on eggshells, swaying gently from side to side. You listened to the news and songs that made you happy, read translations and the traditions of the Prophet, and walked in the garden every afternoon. You received neighbors or women who came visiting from the village; after a while you felt that they were an interruption, as the boredom began to outweigh the pleasure. The conversations you had with them were ordinary. You preferred talking to yourself or to young students. You liked eating alone, explaining, “God forbid that anyone should see me chewing my food like a cow.”

You sat looking as if the dishes of food were beneath your notice, taking even your favorite things slowly and daintily, and eating in abstracted silence to convey the impression that, rather than eating, you were thinking about important matters. You chose the moments when everybody was preoccupied elsewhere to go to the bathroom, for we never even heard the cistern flushing. Only when you performed your ritual washing did you pray in a loud voice. You prepared for the night, for your tidy bed again, picking a jasmine blossom or a sprig of honeysuckle to put in a coffee cup on the little table by your bed, calling to Zemzem to make green tea and sipping it as if it were the elixir of life. “The smell of it gladdens the heart,” you murmured.

Then you changed your long white dress for a nightgown and sat in your room listening to the radio, leaving Zemzem to watch the television news in the living room because it disturbed the calm waves around you, even if you turned the sound down. You didn’t like the way the people looked, letting fly at an overdressed female newscaster and describing the program’s suave male host as tedious.

If I came back from school and saw you with your head bound, I knew you had a headache. You would wrap it in a piece of red cloth and say, “Red. Like the blood pounding in my head.”

When you called me to lie beside you, convinced that your pain would vanish as soon as I was close to you, you would lay a piece of gauze on the pillow so that I wouldn’t be infected by your sore eyes. But having done that, you would take me in your arms and kiss me all over my face, head, hands, neck, chest, back, and even on my mouth, telling me how much you loved me.

When I saw your vanity case, my curiosity got the better of me, even though its contents never changed; nothing new in it, nothing missing: hairpins shining in their little packet, various kohl jars, dried grasses in a paper bag, a sheet of paper folded inside another one in an envelope, a ring with a dark blue stone set in diamonds. I took the box to my room and sat cross-legged like you poring over it, leaning forward like you did, and took out a kohl jar. You made up your eyes, looking in the little mirror in the lid without blinking like my mother or Zemzem, your gaze wide and steady, and I tried to imitate you. Then I took out the box of face powder and opened the lid, which had a picture of a woman like a Roman empress on it. What color was this powder? How was it I’d never seen any like it before, although I was quite familiar with different types, including what my mother and Fadila kept on their dressing tables?

One day I asked you about this strange color, and you smiled proudly and assured me that you didn’t follow others blindly like a sheep. You told me how you mixed three types
of powder together to produce it. I asked you how you’d come to invent it. “When the spring comes, I’ll show you,” you answered.

I looked into your eyes. The big greenish-brown iris almost dominated the white, which was so white as to be nearly blue. Then I looked at your strong, slim fingers, your short nails, and the sleeves of your dress, which almost covered your slim wrists. You were like a queen bending over to pick a flower.

The spring had come. “Please forgive me, little one,” you said, prising open a flower bud, and showing me the color of the powder inside, pink, brown-red, peach, and even white. I also remember you showing me the “shy plant” and you said I mustn’t let anyone else know the secret, to protect the plant. You struck it gently as if caressing it. “Come on. Be shy,” you said, and the plant responded at once by going limp. After a while it stood up as straight as before. “You see. A woman must be shy like that sometimes too,” you told me.

I’m sure I’ve said before that I’ve never seen you shy, but I’ve seen you humble when you read religious books and say your prayers.

You live in Beirut without my grandfather, whose idea of a serenade is:

Oh, your pretty red panties

Aren’t half as pretty

As what’s inside them

And their fringes and lace

Drive me crazy.

He flies into a rage if he’s hungry and there’s no food on the table, wants to be able to tell his jokes, say what’s upsetting him, recount his dreams whenever he feels like it, even if it’s the middle of the night. Everyone criticized you for living between Beirut and the village, not staying with my grandfather. None of them guessed that you were happier doing that, because you had worked out that when you lived with a man you needed to have an airing from time to time, like clothes in your wardrobe.

I realized that you weren’t happy with a lot of things to do with my mother and Isaf and our house, even though at the mere sound of your name my mother listened intently to the conversation and stopped laughing and joking. She was afraid of you, and always tried to see to it that you didn’t know all her business. She wanted you to approve of her. It seems I too needed to hear your reaction to what went on in our house, and I told you things that I knew were supposed to be kept from you. As a result I was the cause of your final break with my mother. You took me in your arms, asking me if I loved you. “I want to stay at your house,” I said, preparing the ground for your next question, “Why, my love?”

I knew full well that I was going to regret what I said. “Because Mom and Isaf argue about you and my grandfather, about my Mom’s friends that Granddad loves,” I answered, my heart pounding.

You told her in a voice gentle as the breeze that you were afraid for me because of the way she carried on and it was wrong for a child like me to live in a place that was more like Khan Toomain than a family house. You grabbed my hand without discussing the subject further, and led me towards
the door. I looked back at my mother and Isaf, upset at being the cause of their distress. They wouldn’t let me go with you. They swooped down on you, trying to pull me away from you, and you suddenly let go of me, your chin trembling, swearing that you would never set foot in this house of ill repute again as long as you lived. “Unless there’s an illness or a death,” you added as a parting shot.

My mother screamed after you that you wanted to bring us bad luck; you were hoping for our downfall; you’d never loved her.

You stopped visiting us after that. My grandfather still came, in spite of that day’s events, which I tried to blot out of my mind. For a long time I even suppressed my curiosity about the place called Khan Toomain because I didn’t want to remember my bad feelings. A long time afterwards I found out it was the place where the peasants rested themselves and their animals on long journeys. For two piastres they bought a ticket which allowed them in, then they unloaded their donkeys and lay down on their blankets wherever they could find a place.

To this day I’ve never told you exactly what happened when my grandfather visited us. I was frightened that you would accuse me of betraying you. And I was betraying you, even though I was so young. My mother’s face used to light up when Grandfather appeared. She would exclaim delightedly at the good things he brought with him and hover around Ali like a bee around nectar as he unloaded the car. Grandfather said to her, “For heaven’s sake, you don’t have to be so pleased about a bit of flour and cooking butter! Be more serious. You’re married to an important merchant.”

My mother laughed in reply, rushing to see to the boxes and bags in case Isaf hid them somewhere and she couldn’t find them.