Beirut Blues (32 page)

A little before dark we reached Besharri. We drank arrack and ate and laughed. I felt drawn to both of them and pictured myself lying between them. I was happy. The Cedars were visible in the darkness. I thought about them for a while, then put them out of my mind. We went to the disco; it was almost empty and I noticed a group of men discussing politics in a corner. From time to time they whispered and debated earnestly, their heads close together, or one of them raised his voice angrily. They were guardians of the Cedars
and the ski lifts. In the hotel reception hung a photo of the Shah of Iran and Soraya when they visited the Cedars.

Although I was alone, I slept well and woke up the next day entirely happy. We walked to the Cedars, which looked from a distance like animals huddled together for protection. As we drew nearer we noticed the fence which had been erected around them. Were they afraid that someone would dig them up, since there had been thefts from other national monuments?

“The trees are decaying, and they’re trying to do something about it.”

“Why? Are they like teeth?”

Trees die standing up. They are normally struck down by some disease which nobody notices at first. Once our oak tree in the village began dropping a sticky deposit on the washing underneath. My grandparents were concerned for months and talked about it as if it were human.

“I first touched these trees when I was a child, but I still don’t know what you call these things; they’re not leaves and yet they’re not pine needles.”

“There’s someone who wants to poison the Cedars so that they won’t be a symbol of Lebanon any longer.” Jawad’s whimsical notion seemed to strike him suddenly and he continued. “You know, that’s not impossible. Maybe they’re trying to wipe out the heart of Lebanon.”

Simon shook his head and laughed. “Don’t get carried away. It’s easy to imagine your opponents have long-term plans, when in fact they do things on the spur of the moment just like you.”

There were plants growing on the mountainside, all alike
and strangely familiar. Simon laughed and put his arms around me. “You need glasses, darling. Where is it you come from? You should know. It’s cannabis.”

“Do they have it here as well?”

“Why shouldn’t they? The Bekaa, here, everywhere. See, they know how to care for cannabis, but not the Cedars! You in the western sector know nothing about us!”

“Visit us more often and tell us,” I laughed.

“We can’t live without you. You have everything in the west—wheat, flour, fuel, spare parts for washing machines and fridges. We’re being strangled economically without you.”

“You’ve forgotten the most important thing, Simon,” remarked Jawad. “What about Asmahan? You only get her in the western sector.”

I knew why Jawad had come out with this: because Simon had called me darling and put his arms around me. I looked at Simon: there was nothing between us anymore. I let my eyes rest on the silent cedar trees and the mountainside where the hashish sprang green from the hard earth, thinking how things can change.

We returned to West Beirut, leaving the mountain breezes behind us. In no time it was as if we’d never been away from the damp heat, and Jawad seemed to consider himself under my protection again. I wondered if he was like the rest: the moment they landed in Beirut they adopted me as their barometer, observing my tiniest movements and taking comfort from them or reading disturbing signs into them, especially when the atmosphere grew more tense and rumors overshadowed the untroubled days which suddenly seemed
like borrowed time. There were sporadic outbreaks of firing, and Ruhiyya was behaving as if we’d been away for ages and were ignorant of the realities of life there. She took hold of Jawad’s hand just as I did with visitors to Beirut. “Come on, my dear,” she cries. “Leave now, before it’s too late. They’ll start fighting again soon.”

“Okay,” answers Jawad, trying to be casual, but his anxiety shows him up. “What do you think, Miss Asma,” he says to me, “should I be worried like my cousin seems to think?”

I was always shocked by visitors, but these last few days had brought us closer together and made him seem less like one. But here he was now treating his own life as if it was more precious than any other in the country. Perhaps he and the others who had left were perfectly entitled to do so: they had escaped to protect the precious gift of life while we persisted in walking carelessly over minefields.

“You’re more scared than she is,” I wanted to say.

“It’s for you to decide,” was what I did say.

We went into a café, almost the only one where we could observe people like us. There were two girls sitting alone together and it was obvious that the other customers were wondering if they were easy meat, as they laughed and smoked and drank gin and tonic.

I felt a pang of regret for the noisy cafés of the past, when it was impossible to hear what your companions were saying, and freedom hung in the air with the steam rising from the coffee machine. In those days there was too little time to absorb all that was going on, and even men and women from the Gulf sat together in sidewalk cafés. The
atmosphere here wasn’t what we wanted, and we rushed out, intimacy flowing all around us, setting us apart from the rest of the street.

We walked along, holding hands with bravado; we were afraid of losing each other; the streets themselves appeared hostile to beautiful, uncomplicated faces, or unusual clothes. Men and women alike stared at us, making me hold Jawad’s hand tighter. I didn’t know what he was thinking about me at that moment, but I was wishing that he wasn’t leaving, because getting used to life here without him was going to be hard. We wanted to sit together in a quiet place and made for the bar of a nearby hotel to join others who like us had taken refuge in the gentle gloom from the brightness of the day.

“I’m going soon, and I’m starting to feel so close to you.”

“Don’t go, then,” I laughed.

He ignored my laughter. “I want to take you with me. I want to make you come away with me.”

“You’ll come back to visit us?” I said anxiously.

“I don’t know when. Not for years maybe.”

I seize his hand suddenly and bend over it and kiss it, then hold it in both my hands and press my face to it and kiss it again. I love the feel of it and want to put it on my hair and neck and throw myself into his arms and let him stroke me like he strokes Ruhiyya.

I raised my head slightly, wondering how to avoid looking at him and the other customers in the bar. As soon as I looked up he brought his face close to mine, put his arm around me, and kissed me as if he were going to pull my lips
off. We only stopped to take a little breath, like two expert swimmers.

I fidgeted and stared at the table before I looked around me. We were sitting in a corner and the bartender was polishing glasses.

This happiness turned to confusion because the kisses had triggered off that other feeling in me. But this time I knew it was an extension of my affection, even a response to his voice and the things he said. I was scared nevertheless that the instinctive feelings would become more and more powerful and I would give in to them and think only of the moment. I wondered why I shouldn’t let myself go. Was it because there was no fighting just then, and in the lull I couldn’t justify urging my feelings on to the limit? Or should I banish such thoughts and enjoy this sensation even if our relationship was temporary?

We sat in my car, with him at the wheel. The sun had begun to set, leaving a red glow around the edges of the sky like pieces of watermelon. I looked around me wondering, as the noise of the city showed no signs of abating, why these people weren’t like him and me.

I told him to drive along to where a tall pine tree sheltered the balcony of an old building. We stopped there and got out and went up the steps. “Where are we going?” he asked.

Barely pausing to introduce him to my friend when she opened the door, I hurried him past her and up onto the roof: “A few more steps and we’ll be in an oasis. You won’t be able to help thinking of the past, peacetime, normal everyday
life, when you see the washing hanging out to dry, the old water tanks, and the city looking calm and familiar, like somewhere with soul, where children live, where there’s night and day, sunset and dawn: it’s still our city from here.”

Beirut, you looked composed. The color of the sunset put a veil over the destruction and made you a friendly place, with the voices of your inhabitants floating gently up from a distance, as if the war hadn’t damaged you at all.

He takes my hand and brings it up to his mouth, then puts it in his pocket. “I know why you’ve brought me here. You want me to stay.”

“Not at all,” I lie. “When you come back to visit us, it’ll be just like feast days when I was a child.”

He squeezes my hand. “I want to be with you on my own.”

“Who’s stopping you?” I reply gaily, although I long to hold him tight and rest my head on his chest.

We are drawn together, our limbs and desires intertwining. “Who’s stopping me? Madam Ruhiyya, Madam your grandmother, the martyrs’ portrait painter, Fadila.”

“Isn’t there someone from your side?”

“Yes, there is. But I can’t help myself.”

“I’ve seen a picture of her. Ruhiyya showed it to me.”

We went down the steps into my friend’s apartment and found her trying to get through to her office in New York via Cyprus. Assembled around her were the Arabic books and oriental accessories which she exported. As she shouted the customs numbers through the phone, the feeling which had been there for a few moments on the roof was erased, and we
were brought back to the reality of the city which had been reduced to a connecting link, your beauty for export. As we made our way home I hoped Ruhiyya would be there so that I wouldn’t be alone with him. When I heard her voice as we climbed the stairs, I wished the opposite. Eagerly she spread out a caftan which she’d bought in Al-Dahiya for Jawad’s girlfriend to repay her for the bottle of perfume she’d sent.

“Look at that color. She’ll be wild about it. Do you think it’s her size?”

No. I didn’t have a fit of jealousy. She’d got there first. I had to be cheerful about it. What vexed me was Ruhiyya’s acknowledgment of her existence. The caftan looked as if it had been made by a seamstress who didn’t know what she was doing, and the cheap material and nasty color didn’t help.

I had resolved to keep our relationship just as it was so that the sense of satisfaction didn’t leave me. If you wanted someone who wasn’t there, your imagination could take control and mislead you and you could think you were in love.

“I’ve got a caftan I can do without,” I said.

I hurried to my room before I changed my mind or they noticed my confusion, opened my wardrobe, and chose a caftan from among the many there: old, threadbare ones made by hand, bought when they came into fashion in the late sixties, and new machine-made ones.

Jawad examined it and exclaimed over its beauty.

“Think how much that must have cost, Asmahan,” said Ruhiyya, disappointment written all over her face.

“That’s not relevant. I’m paying for the one from Al-Dahiya.”
Then he turned to me. “I’m not taking your caftan. Go and put it on. Let’s see how Lebanon’s Joan of Arc looks in it.”

“Asmahan, head of the tourist section. Asmahan, hostess, guide, and interpreter,” I finished for him.

I went into my room and put it on and didn’t fasten the opening with a brooch like I used to. How sensible I must have been in those days! Or was it the fashion then to cover your breasts completely? I’d stopped feeling embarrassed, perhaps because I’d decided that our relationship wasn’t going anywhere, and was looking forward to getting letters from him. That’s what I needed in this country, to receive letters, to sit down and write letters and get replies instead of composing them in my mind. Like a heroine in a novel, I’d tell him about what went on in the atmosphere of war and cease-fires, I would be a martyr or a witness; he was right to call me a Lebanese Joan of Arc.

I rushed in feeling suffocated and flung open the window and leaned right out. He didn’t comment on how I looked in the caftan. “You should wear a different caftan every day. Don’t give any away,” cried Ruhiyya. Then she added, “Look at you—you’re two mature people. Why don’t you get married? Wouldn’t that be better, Jawad? You know what they say about marrying someone of a different religion. It brings you a whole lot of problems you’re better off without.”

“So you’re thinking of him and what’s best for him, not me?” I teased.

“No. Of course not. Of you,” she cried. “I feel a pang every time I look at you and see how beautiful you are, and
get to know you better and better, and I say to myself, why hasn’t somebody had the intelligence to step up and pick that flower yet?”

“Asmahan doesn’t want to marry. Go on, ask her.”

She rebuffed him angrily. “Get out of here! Only foreign girls call out their wares in the street.”

Our eyes met and we laughed at the thought of how I’d grabbed his hands and kissed them a few hours before and buried my face in them and sucked his lips greedily and let his leg touch mine and his hand rest on my thighs as he steered with one hand.

Ruhiyya pounded the raw kibbeh, then sat waiting for Fadila to bring her fresh basil and marjoram, because the herbs had all withered in their pots while we were away. She sang a funny tune as she waited: “Take me in your suitcase, Jawad. Roll me up in the wink of an eye.”

“There’s not much room in it,” responded Jawad drily, but he asked me to go to the sea. “We’ll look at the sea and buy some wine.”

Look at the sea? He wants to see the sea, get a spoonful of it before he goes. It’s only tourists who feel guilty if they don’t see everything, if time doesn’t permit them at least to cast their eye over the places they haven’t seen.

Embroidered Palestinian cushions were on Jawad’s list, although it was the folly of the massacres in the camp which interested him more than the beauty and color of the work. The shop where these cushions were sold was still there at the camp entrance. When we went in, there was a smell of coffee and the woman in charge sipped from a cup and knocked the ash off her cigarette as she showed us the cushions.
The voice of an Egyptian singer on the radio rose from one of the shacks nearby.