Beirut Blues (22 page)

Then he asked her to dance for him. He seemed absorbed for a few minutes and chuckled and called out, “You bad girl!” But after a bit he got up and went out, oblivious to his surroundings. Juhayna is a snail leaving a sticky trail behind her for my grandfather to catch his feet in. I think about a substitute for her day and night. I used to imagine that I’d found one as I lay in bed, but as soon as I woke up in the morning my search began all over again.

This was how I began writing to you. I was thinking about what I’d inherited from you and my mother and it gave me the energy to embark on my task. I can’t believe I ever studied philosophy and logic and I return to books you read to me and made me read which I still remember by heart. What I see now is a girl, a woman, on the porch, by the clothesline, in the kitchen with the pot for making chamomile tea in her hand, and my grandfather happy at the warm sound of her footsteps and the familiarity of her presence.

My Dear Jawad,

I see Ruhiyya surrounded by bedding and a mound of cotton filling from a pillow which she has emptied onto a straw mat to air. “My darling little cousin is coming, there’s so much to do.”

Her voice fills the little dried-up garden, and the self-sown pomegranate tree waits and listens.

“Yesterday Jawad phoned the family we don’t mention. ‘France has taken you away from us, has it?’ I said. ‘And you’ve forgotten Ruhiyya except to send her perfume and silk scarves. I suppose you think they’ll make up for not seeing you.’ And the son of a bitch said, ‘What do you want me to do about it? Shall I come and visit you?’ ‘Of course,’ I said, and he said, ‘Sorry. I can’t come straightaway. I’ll be with you in a few days.’ ”

I didn’t know what to reply, but I felt a sudden glow of pleasure as if this news concerned me directly. I thought I
sensed Ruhiyya’s eyes on me and tried not to let her see the pink in my cheeks. But she was engrossed in her fight with the ants, beating the bedding with a stick and asking why God had created them.

I laughed, covering up my excitement at the idea of this Jawad, whom—as far as I knew—I had never seen in my life. But I’d seen your book in French in pride of place in her “display cabinet” among the glass tea caddies and sugared-almond boxes she’d collected at weddings. When Ruhiyya was absorbed in frying eggplant and zucchini, I used to try to amuse myself by looking at the things around me, including this book. I was usually content to hold it in my hands and flick through it, as I didn’t know much French, but today this wasn’t enough to dispel the boredom I felt in Ruhiyya’s gloomy house. My emotions were aroused as if a man direct from Europe were suddenly with me in the room.

I put this down to the loneliness I had begun to suffer away from Beirut, which appeared to me now as a place seething with life. I wished Ruhiyya would take me with her to meet him, for besides being curious to see what you were like, I wanted to go to the airport, even if it was Damascus. It was ages since I had met someone coming from abroad or seen the inside of an airport.

But Ruhiyya didn’t pick this up, although she read my coffee cup and saw money and letters and people. She interpreted this as meaning a cash transfer from my mother, and the people were obviously the occupiers of the land. Then she repeated the story of the doctor who had heard her cousin talking on a radio program broadcast from France.
“He said Jawad was a genius. He suggested giving me a checkup, and examined me all over and gave me pills for nothing.”

I didn’t question my eagerness until I was walking home over the dry plain where the poppies jostled brightly together, swaying in the hot breeze. My feet knocked against the stones, I waved a fly away from my nose, and the silent mountains seemed to be looking surreptitiously down onto the plain. I saw myself standing in front of you, then I wondered how your lips would taste, if you knew what a kiss was, if someone who originally came from around here would understand that a mouth was for passion and lust, not just eating and shouting. I tried to stop myself: it was probably boredom making me so interested in the new arrival.

Then I put the blame on Ruhiyya, who was always mentioning you and making me feel that I’d known you for ages and wanted you. The most logical explanation was that I was desperate for a man, any man, in this drought. I saw an attractive blond-haired man walking along with a fighter. He turned to look at me and smiled. I stared back at him in disbelief and smiled too. Was it possible in this baked red land that I should meet such a man? I realized from the way he looked at me that he too had been surprised to see me here walking on these unmade roads. However, we both went on our way, although we kept looking back at each other until he turned off towards the hill where Juhayna’s friends worked, and I knew he must be the foreign chemist who was in charge at the opium laboratory.

I knock on Ruhiyya’s door, my heart beating so fiercely
that I look down at my blouse to see if anything shows through. “Shh.” Ruhiyya opens the door when I’ve barely begun to knock. “He’s still asleep, bless him.”

A suitcase is an unexpected sight in Ruhiyya’s house and its presence transforms the place; I imagine it makes it look like a hotel room in Afghanistan. Then I see things which take me off on a different tack: tennis shoes stuffed with thick white socks, and sunglasses on top of a pile of foreign magazines.

My thoughts stray far from here. I think of a life where there are universities, where people jog on beaches and wide city sidewalks. Ruhiyya takes me by the hand and leads me into the kitchen, and whispers to me, “I love him, this boy, you should see, he’s so kind. He even brought coffee and tea and jars of dried milk like Nido, and canned food. He says people are going hungry here!” She picks up an unfamiliar-looking jar of coffee and asks me if I want a cup. I nod, feeling expectant and happy in a way I haven’t for a long time.

I sit with her waiting for you to get up, and distract myself by telling her about Juhayna. But Ruhiyya isn’t with me today. Your arrival seems to have turned her existence upside down. She leaves the beans boiling on the stove and drags me out into the backyard again. “I told him to write the story of my life with his stinking brother,” she whispers confidentially, “and he told me it had already been done and made into a film. It’s true. It could have been me. He said it was about a girl who loved a man and thought he loved her. But she couldn’t read or write like him and he got ashamed of her in front of his friends. She was fed up, but when he left
her, she went crazy and had to go into an asylum. She learned how to make lace and was never quite right in the head. When he saw her like that, he began to cry and realized how stupid he’d been not to recognize the worth of what he’d had—a pure, noble, sweet spirit …”

I stop her in midflow, telling her the last bit must have been her own invention. Two hours go by and I grow increasingly edgy waiting for you to appear. I make as if to get up, and to my amazement she doesn’t stop me or insist I have lunch with her as usual. But I don’t want to leave. I try to hunt up some juicy details to tell her about my fears for Ricardo because I heard on the news that the Syrians are hunting down the Hizbullah in Beirut, and I realize that I sound as if I am the only one taking any responsibility for him. I raise my voice, ignoring her reminder to keep it down. She is no longer paying any attention. I rise from the table, scraping my chair loudly along the floor. Ruhiyya looks towards her room, and you appear in front of us in shorts and a T-shirt, barefoot, rubbing your eyes, as if you’ve just dropped through the roof. Ruhiyya rushes to put a hand on his shoulder and inquire, “Love, are they your pajamas or your underwear?”

I laugh to cover my confusion as you are looking at me, obviously astonished to find me there. “They’re shorts,” you answer.

I laugh again, annoyed that she hasn’t introduced me. “Asmahan, isn’t it?”

I am tongue-tied. She asks you disapprovingly how you know me, then, correcting herself, says of course you must know me because she’s talked so much about me. But you
say, “Come on! She was always visiting you. And once that boy—what was his name? Abdullah. Once he followed me into the café with Asmahan behind him and told me you wanted to see me.”

Your eyes rest on me for a moment, and you go on, “And you, madam, said to me, ‘Is it true you live in Beirut and go to school near the university and you’ve got a car?’ and I answered, ‘That’s right. I live in Beirut, I go to school next to the university, and my father has a car.’ And you said to me, ‘Okay, if that’s true, Ruhiyya wants you to marry me.’ ”

I laugh awkwardly, feeling pleased, and then slightly let down. Your openness, your easy manner, suggest that you think of me almost as a distant relative, and someone who isn’t really part of your world anymore. You’d teased me at the time, telling me that I’d got myself a husband and asking about my family. When I told you who my grandparents were, you’d muttered something about that being awkward, and I’d burst into tears and run off.

Ruhiyya claps her hands together appreciatively and cries, “You monkey! I don’t remember it at all. Do you, Asmahan? God help me! Has he got supernatural powers? And he still remembers the crack in the table. He asked me about it and said he had to make sure whether he’d dreamed it, or if it was really there.”

I don’t remember. It’s all new to me. I try now, I try, and I see myself sitting before a plate of eggplant and zucchini and fried cauliflower, and hear Ruhiyya talking to her mother, affectionate and irritable by turns. One day the old woman asked why there wasn’t any meat. Ruhiyya shouted
at her, “Shall I cut off my thigh for you and make kibbeh? There’s no meat in the shops today.” She snatched the plate away from under her mother’s nose, saying, “I’ll feed it to the cats,” and began to go, “Noo, noo, noo, noo. Come and eat this. Mom’s full.”

You loll back on the sofa and I feel uncomfortable as the two of you have obviously forgotten I exist. I wonder whether to pretend to occupy myself somehow or slip away. I want to join in your conversation but can’t think of anything to say. You start yawning again and I decide that you are so much at ease because you have the impression that I am a confirmed old maid, or someone like Ruhiyya who sings to console herself, fries eggplant, mourns her husband, and spreads bedding in the sun to air. Do you know I’m a trained architect?

All along the road home I blamed myself for having been so awkward. The crowning thing had been my surreptitious attempt at intimacy when I said, “You look as if you’ve just woken up.”

I shook my head as I walked along. “Girl, you’re not normal,” I said aloud.

I was uncertain whether to go and see Ruhiyya as usual the next day and decided not to, convincing myself that the monotony of village life would get to you before long and you would seek me out with Ruhiyya.

But then my preoccupations took a different turn.

I awoke to hear Zemzem shouting, “It’s him. Yahya … Ricardo. Fadila’s nephew.”

“Impossible,” I thought to myself. I had been wondering what had happened to him and his aunt Fadila, when I heard
that the Syrians were arresting everyone in Hizbullah, and all the time Ricardo had been making his way to our house crouching down among the dead trees and the blaze of crimson blooms.

“Ricardo, Ricardo,” I repeated to myself as I jumped out of bed, pulling on jeans and a shirt over my nightgown. Ricardo stood shyly on our porch while Naima inundated him with questions. Why had he come? Where had he come from? Was his aunt in Beirut? Who was winning? How had he crossed from the Western sector?

Either Ricardo hadn’t expected to see me there, or he was asking me to protect him from the onslaught. He turned to me with a shocked expression in his eyes and sat down on the edge of the porch, like most of our male visitors, with no pretension, still holding his suitcase. It looked scratched and battered enough to belong to a traveling salesman, or perhaps it mirrored the state of its owner. Ricardo, as usual, spoke without wasting words, saying he had crossed the Christian lines by taxi. I felt sorry for him sitting there, in his ancient trousers and worn shirt. He looked so hunched and dejected that Naima soon stopped bothering with him. I felt a growing desire to take him in my arms, but not like the time before.

That night he had stood at our garden gate in Beirut while the rain poured down on us both. All sorts of notions came rushing into my head as I took the heavy paper bundle he was handing me. Was it bombs, a gun, money? When I took my time to open it, he said, “I hope you like it. They told me my mother gave it to me when I was little.”

I put my hand in and took out a metallic object. It was
dark all around us, so Ricardo lit a match. It was a squat little gold-colored man holding a red staff in one hand and a shield in the other, with a mouth gaping open like the entrance to a cave, from which I pulled another man and so on like a set of Russian dolls.

Ricardo struck one match after another and I stood there stupefied, wondering if I was in a dream. Each figure was dressed in striped trousers to the knee and a matching cap. I no longer saw anything new like this in Beirut. If shops had new imports for sale, they tended to be shiny, vulgar, stainless-steel goods. We were so taken up with our own war and troubles that we were hardly aware of the existence of other countries; and here were these African statuettes or chess pieces proclaiming that other countries, other cultures, did exist and holding out the hope of escape to a new life. I felt an indescribable pleasure when I looked at them and asked Ricardo if I could keep them until morning so that I could see them in the daylight. I couldn’t help wondering what had made him think of bringing them. “They’re for you,” he replied.

I flushed and said I couldn’t take them because they were a reminder of his mother.

“They’ll be safer if they’re with you,” he answered, to my astonishment. “My aunt would chuck them out or give them away.”

I sensed that his visits to us weren’t only to complain about his aunt or to consult me about his life. I felt uneasy when I saw his eyes shifting from my face to my breasts to my hands. I noticed a vein throbbing in his neck, fit to burst. All the same I didn’t pull my caftan more tightly around me
or go in and change it for my street clothes. In the match flame I saw the sharp beauty of his face like an effigy, his almond eyes, his brilliant white teeth. But this wasn’t why I let him embrace me; there were many reasons: in particular the fact that he didn’t have a family and friends, and his desire for me, which made him tremble the moment his body came into contact with my breasts. I pretended not to understand what was happening to him, even though he remained frozen, scared, embarrassed by his heavy, tremulous breathing. I waited until it had steadied before I extricated myself from the dead weight of his head and chest, thinking that if I had dreamed this, I wouldn’t have believed it could happen in reality.