Beirut Blues (23 page)

Now I was worried that he had come to take refuge with us until things improved, for our village no longer welcomed strangers as it had done in the past. I smiled at him: “What is it, Ricardo?” Immediately the words came spilling out of him, fighting to be heard, as if they’d been imprisoned inside him for too long. He’d seen the Syrians entering houses, searching for members of Hizbullah everywhere. Under the beds, on rooftops, in lofts. His aunt had made him and her crazy brother stay inside. Ricardo wasn’t restless being confined to the house. He wanted her to hide him, or smuggle him out anywhere, as long as he didn’t fall into Syrian hands. They’d arrested Kazim and the Modern Sheikh and he’d felt his turn was coming. And Bassam, who used to hang around with them sometimes, had appeared in his true colors as a Syrian agent and would be sure to denounce him.

I noticed the tension on Ricardo’s face even though he spoke with energy. Looking down, he lowered his voice and
said, “My aunt started to go crazy. She wanted me to go abroad and she was trying to find the money for a ticket. But I could only think of coming here.”

He put his hand to his shirt pocket and took out a bit of paper, which he proffered diffidently. “From my aunt.”

I read Fadila’s handwriting: “Please, Asma, get him out of the country any way you can. I’ll never forget your kindness and trouble. I have two twenty-two-carat gold chains. I hope you understand.”

I folded the letter and thought of the two gold chains encircling her plump white wrist. She had promised them to so many people: me if I got married; her aunt to pay for the best medical treatment; another nephew; the doctor in the mental hospital where her mother was.

While the whole household was gathered around Ricardo, a woman came with a message from the house on the hill asking if the Afghan was meant to come to them and had lost his way. We all laughed: the color of Ricardo’s skin confused the local people.

Ricardo stayed with us for two days before Zemzem accompanied him to Damascus Airport with a one-way ticket to Africa. With him he had two old shirts that had been my grandfather’s, two cotton shirts of mine, some dollars, and a letter from the Syrian officer in charge of our sector in Beirut asking the Syrian authorities to facilitate things for the said Yahya Ricardo, who was known to him personally, and not to be misled by his non-Arab surname, as he and his family were sincere supporters of the Syrian state.

As I watched him walk away across the orchard in his old trousers, carrying his scratched suitcase, I knew he’d
think of me when he was next alone with a woman but he wouldn’t talk to her. He would think that it was enough to have his eyes open, for in childhood he had kept his eyes shut day after day and refused to open them. Would he keep his mouth shut in Syria? My concern for him weighed on me like a mountain. As he disappeared, he took with him the assurance he had unconsciously given me when he took me back into a world I had lost touch with after Naser and then Simon left.

Ricardo from Africa had led me back to the heart of Beirut, entering by a different door from Naser, since all the events took place in an area like a walnut, containing hollow chambers which interlocked but were sealed off from one another. Whenever I came back into the swing of things, I found myself filled with new life, eager to be in touch with the people in the streets. I felt sorry that he’d returned to join the ranks of the Shia and found them fighting one another, and was leaving and forcing me to turn a page.

I found I was wrong about you: you weren’t bored; in fact, you seemed to wish the day had more hours in it. You didn’t notice the evenings dragging: they were for writing up your journal in thick black ink in a brown leather notebook. You sat and thought about the people you had met, recalling the exact sentences they had used, and the little side road you’d searched for in vain, unable to believe that the villa with its ugly stone had been built in its place. I found I was in the journal as the little bride who now smoked cigarettes and drank coffee sometimes, and liked wine and books. Asmahan, who had been so tidy and well dressed when she came to ask for your hand in her youth, had become a
Gypsy. It was possible her hair hadn’t seen water for months and her dresses were like kimonos or gowns in Italian Renaissance paintings. Ruhiyya, it seemed, even made kibbeh and cups of tea with soul! “I was surprised at the state of her teeth: they looked as if a woodpecker had been at them while she was asleep. But they are nothing compared with some people’s teeth which are a rusty tobacco color, and like pencils sharpened until there is almost nothing left. These teeth say more about the economic and psychological state of the country than statistical and social studies. I have made up my mind to have Ruhiyya’s teeth put right by Brigitte Bardot’s dentist.”

We clustered around you, our eyes nearly touching your pen, and Ruhiyya was proud that she had done something which would help mankind for centuries to come, by making an active contribution to your literary career. Even I was delighted at the way you had described me and felt a desire to be close to you.

But as time went by, your enthusiasm for everything from the past made me critical of your naïveté, and I hated the way you carried your camera around photographing everything. I felt we’d all suddenly become specimens under your microscope and regretted ever having looked on with pleasure as you wrote in that orderly notebook with the thick pen.

These feelings didn’t last, and before long I was wanting to be back in the gloom of Ruhiyya’s house, circling around you, waiting eagerly for you to say something concerning me in particular, hoping you would touch me or brush against my dress. I saw your teeth when you laughed and thought
about your mouth covering mine and your thighs rubbing against mine. Did you think I was still a virgin? Or that, like Ruhiyya, I had been in love with someone and was living on memories? Couldn’t you see beyond the few tiny white hairs, the wrinkles on my forehead, the prominent veins in my hands which I’d recently taken care to raise in the air at intervals, like an Indian dancer or a geisha, so that the veins subsided?

It’s Billie Holiday. I must stop listening to her. She fires my emotions with her wounded voice calling out to the man, like a cat in April. Then I blame the dry-burning flame rising up from the ground and penetrating right into the veins of the trees, making me cling to this country—I call it that because it seems like a place on its own, the high mountains, the plains extending indefinitely, the sky almost touching the earth. It’s as if the city, the university, the buildings whose tiled floors I can remember exactly, and the sea where I learned to swim years before have ceased to exist. When I look about me in the morning and see the fig trees, unmoving, I wonder if it’s possible that I only arrived in the village ten days ago. Perhaps I have never left, or never been here before and ridden my grandfather’s horse and gone back to Beirut to school or university with my hair bleached by the sun.

I lie on my bed peering into a small mirror, trying to see what you would see if you lay beside me or on top of me: the veins at my temples, the little hairs between my eyebrows, the redness on either side of my nose. When I try to halt the flow of my imagination, the desire to be with you grows.
Whatever I am doing, I hear your voice saying what I want it to say until one afternoon you appear with Ruhiyya, and my obsession with you reverts to irritation as I see you descend from the porch with my grandfather and go off towards the orchards listening to you intently. You pick one opium poppy, then another, and hold them up to your face, looking where my grandfather is pointing. I hear you laugh. I also feel estranged from Ruhiyya, who looks different today, beautiful, with her hair newly hennaed, kohl around her eyes, a touch of pinkish-red lipstick, and in a suit which is old-fashioned but still elegant. This concern with her appearance makes her seem more remote.

I quickly learn that I’m not behind this visit to our house: it is my grandfather and the martyrs’ portrait painter and the mourning ceremonies for the new martyr Muhammad. Putting her arm around me, Ruhiyya whispers that she wishes she hadn’t told you about the mourning ceremony, as you are insisting on coming with her. It’s only meant to be for women, and she doesn’t want you to find a way of getting in to hear her. She’s scared she’ll laugh if there’s a member of her family in the audience.

“You’ve got yourself up like this to go to a funeral?” I say critically.

“His mother made everyone promise not to wear black and not to cry. She said a martyr of less than twenty goes straight to Paradise.”

I regret speaking so roughly and tell her jokingly that she looks younger and prettier than usual.

She kisses me on both cheeks. “Thank you, my dear. It
takes a lot of time and trouble. I don’t usually bother when only the flies are going to see me. You’ve got Beirut and people to see you and friends and lovers.”

I see you looking at the new maid, Suma, wherever she goes. As usual she is moving extremely slowly as if she’s afraid she’ll slip if she hurries at all. She is bending to gather dry twigs and leaves and flowering basil to put before the statue of Buddha which stands in pride of place in her room. She always has different flowers stuck in her long plait, most often the yellow hibiscuses, which close at night. Perhaps you find her strange: although she looks so different from us, she has picked up the village accent.

Suma is the woman who has come to live in our house to provide my grandfather with his quota of touching, pinching, and nibbling, and no doubt other things too. Juhayna and her bright hair have faded into oblivion with the arrival of Suma and her black Sri Lankan hair hanging well below her waist. A few days went by before everyone was accustomed to her name. Sufa, Sumana, Subya. But then the whole house became engrossed in her doings, starting from the time she chose to take her first bath naked near the water pipe which extended snakelike from the cistern to the edge of the porch. She didn’t use the soap which Zemzem had given her, but cooking oil and a stone she picked up off the ground. She pounded her flesh with it until her gleaming body seemed to call out and announce its existence. The women of the house crowded together awkwardly at the kitchen door, squawking like startled chickens at the sight of her nakedness, covered only by a pair of panties. Perhaps because she worshipped Buddha, they didn’t rush out to tell her about what was
forbidden and what was allowed. Instead they began watching her as if they were at a movie as she bathed, dried herself, and did her hair, dressing it with more of the cooking oil, which she had decanted into a medicine bottle.

She doesn’t object to my grandfather touching her, however suggestive his touches, but she hates the tweaking and nibbling. She finds it strange that he should want to hurt the submissive flesh and mark its purity, when it is ready to comply with whatever is required of it at work and play. Entertaining my grandfather has become part of her routine. As soon as she’s finished lunch, she follows him into his room, carrying a cup of herbal tea, calm and confident, with no obvious desire to hide what she is doing even from my grandmother. In the evenings she waits for him to call her and smiles at us as she gets up, as if it is time for her to go to work. Who knows? Perhaps the smile means she knows she’s going to sleep with him and sees this as an important part of her job.

I guess that Ruhiyya has told you about my grandfather, since you seem to have been observing him and Suma. My hostility nips me like a scorpion’s sting and I attempt to needle Ruhiyya to get back at her. “What’s going on down there? It looks as if Jawad is interrogating my grandfather. Perhaps he’s thinking of knocking off a book about us and the village,” I say with a scorn worthy of Juhayna.

“He’s desperate to go to the artist’s house. I said you’d go there with him.”

“Go with him?” I say bitingly. “So that he can broadcast gossip about us over the pine trees of Beirut?”

Ruhiyya starts visibly at my tone. Then instead of shouting
back at me, she takes her revenge by telling me that she’s noticed how cold I am towards you, even irritable; if she didn’t know me so well, she’d be sure it was because you hadn’t fallen in love with me; I seemed to find any old magazine more interesting to read than one of your books.

It isn’t really spite, more an unconscious attempt to get under my skin and put a finger on what’s eating at me. I was supposed to have had a brilliant future lined up one way or another. I had a good degree in architecture and made designs for buildings from here to Beirut. Ruhiyya had witnessed the enthusiasm with which I’d noted and recorded the instinctive knowledge of technique displayed in the local buildings. What was the result of it all? Cigarettes, coffee, sleep, silence, laughter, fits of resentment. I ought not to have bared my soul to her as I have since my return, visiting her every day and sitting with her for hours on end. I should have stayed at home, giving her the idea that I was engaged on an important project. Or perhaps I should have visited her dressed in something she would consider nice and expensive, the same kind of thing you saw me in when I was young, not in my “remnants,” as she calls them. My grandmother is right: one should always try to cultivate a special aura and arouse people’s curiosity.

I leave Ruhiyya on the porch and go inside. I realize after a few seconds that I’m not really annoyed with her, and have deliberately set out to hurt her. I go out again laughing, holding her close, crying. I don’t stop when I hear your footsteps crossing the porch. If anything, I cry louder as it occurs to me that now you might think I’m like one of Chekhov’s three sisters, especially as I’m wrapped in a blue
silk embroidered shawl of my grandmother’s. For the first time Ruhiyya acts without recourse to her voice. She says nothing in reply to my grandfather’s inquiries, leads me inside to the washstand in the hall, and washes my face and smoothes my hair with a little water. I submit to her rough hands and burst out laughing. I look at her and she joins in, remembering to curse Satan, the cause of our quarrel. But she wants to finish with the whole episode as quickly as possible and says, “Right, now let me go in and say hello to your grandmother.”