Beirut Blues (34 page)

Musa came in, a big man with a thick mustache. When he stood by Fadila, she scarcely came up to his waist. If she had embraced him like a mother, she would have heard the squeaking of his stomach instead of the beating of his heart. He shook hands all around and asked her if there was anything he could do. “Aren’t you coming with us?” she exclaimed. “Who’s going to take us? Why aren’t you coming?”

He offered to take us to where we wanted to go and come back for us at the end of the evening, but Fadila and Jawad both insisted that he come with us. It didn’t take him long to have us feeling that he really was Fadila’s son, and since she was like my mother, that I was his sister.

“Excuse me for saying so, Asmahan,” he said to me, “you’re dearer to me than a sister, but are you really going out for the evening in that dress? People will think you’re a bedouin.”

“What’s wrong with that?” I laughed.

Jawad asked him why he’d adopted Fadila as a mother.

“It’s amazing, we’re very close. Just as if we’re related.”

I was secretly grateful to Fadila for thinking of sending for Musa, as he knew all the places and who their singers and dancers were and how much they charged for dinner, starting with the hotel on the seafront, which was pathetically empty in spite of the band wearing sombreros.

We were told the place filled up after one, but when Musa wanted reassurances, the manager looked at his powerful frame and lost his nerve. “You’d be better to come back on Saturday night,” he said.

So on we went to another club, which we found bolted and barred, and a third, which had been booked by a family related to a warlord. These clubs were far apart and Jawad offered to pay Musa for the gas. “It’s all paid for,” he said to an uncomprehending Jawad.

Musa’s job must have been to protect the rich and famous from the rats of the night, not the ones which bounded off the garbage heaps every time they heard a car, but those loafing around the club entrances and street corners.

He had ambitions to be like Ali, bodyguard and protector of important personalities, not so he could eat and drink well, but in order to become more powerful. These conditions suited people who knew their way around. Being an escort
meant that doors opened up for you; with your car and gun you could cut through the confusion and delays. You were the one in charge, even more important than the person you were protecting, as he became the ring on your finger, his fate dependent on your strength and intelligence. Through your position you got to know who had their hands on the purse strings, who were the key players, the warlords, the owners of the wealth. Once you had this knowledge, you began to have access to easy money, and as things progressed you came to occupy a powerful position and attract a retinue of followers, some of whom might even act as your bodyguards in time. Such a chance for profit had to be seized with both hands. Musa’s aim was to be an important strongman, not somebody employed by a rich, anonymous emigrant to frighten off thieves. It was clear that Fadila had exaggerated the status of the people I knew, but Musa must have thought that if he got access to Ali through me, then Ali would pass on the jobs which he didn’t have time for and gradually Musa would rise to Ali’s level and overtake him.

We went into the fourth nightclub, where there was a lot of noise and Franco-Arab music playing, women singing along and men swaying in their seats. It was only minutes before our table was heaving with noise, dance, and song like the others, Fadila, Musa, and Ruhiyya swaying in time to the beat of the songs, while Jawad and I sat, overwhelmed by what we saw. Who would think that the world was turned upside down and people were frightened?

Musa pointed out a man dancing and said he was a nobody before the rise in the dollar. The people at the tables
ate, danced, and sang along with the young performers, whose names showed that they came from villages in the south. The city’s legendary nightlife was being undermined. The man with paper bags stuffed full of dollars danced, shaking his stomach in the direction of his veiled wife, whose gold earrings swayed to the music. She moved the wineglasses out of range as soon as the photographer came to take pictures at their table, while Fadila sat happily next to Musa, tugging at her glittering silver scarf every time it slipped back off her head, looking with envy and admiration at a female customer climbing up and dancing on a table where the dishes and glasses had been pushed to one side.

Why the decor—the artificial bunches of grapes, the loud colors on the walls, the awkward, ugly chairs? What I saw provoked powerful physical sensations of rage and bewilderment. What was the relationship of taste to the war? Why did the songs sound as if they were composed by someone in his bath?

The people make a city, and these were strangers. Although they filled the room, I could only see empty spaces.

Jawad and I felt we were in constant communication through what we were thinking, and had no need to talk over the uproar. Some of these rowdy men dancing and shouting had opened businesses with stolen capital and precious artifacts taken from shops and houses. Some of them mixed with well-known people who had active roles in the parties, and long-standing businessmen who had found religious loopholes allowing them to charge interest to their hearts’ desire. There were plenty of drug dealers among them: prewar
exiles coming back with capital, eager for status and prestige now the arena was empty of those who deserved it. Musa pointed out a man working as an intermediary between kidnap groups and hostages’ families. “His life’s in the balance,” he remarked laconically.

At some of the tables were people like Jawad and me, who’d come to see what had happened to you and your inhabitants, and others, like Ruhiyya and Fadila, eager to belong to the world of the rich, if only for a night.

After a while Jawad and I wanted to go home: what we saw was making us miserable. “Rats in fancy clothes,” was Jawad’s accurate description.

We were dependent on Musa to see us back, as the city no longer gave us our freedom for nothing, so we left Ruhiyya and Fadila alone, on condition that Musa would come back for them; they couldn’t understand why we wanted to leave “when things are really humming.”

We stood in the garden. What was going to happen between us when we went up the steps? We breathed to a single rhythm; our words anticipated each other’s thoughts. The need for close physical contact generated by the atmosphere of the city was affecting us both now. We were an island surrounded by heaving waters full of crocodiles. The electricity was off and everything was in darkness. Thought was paralyzed in such an atmosphere; I was like a witch leading an innocent stranger to her castle and working her magic by isolating him there for days on end until he was dependent on her for his survival.

For a while Jawad had been immersed in his fascination
with the past, his desire to find out about the old ways, and blind to the present. Then one day he opened his eyes and saw the dark streets and heaps of garbage, the sound of the generators penetrated his carapace of tolerance, and the noise and murky fumes started to get him down. He began listening to the news and found it didn’t make sense. Even the television irritated him, because of the clothes the announcers wore, the ideas expressed, or the banal songs. The newspapers no longer provided him with a hunting ground for his sarcastic jokes; it almost seemed to cause him physical pain to read of the senselessness of what was happening.

“Do you remember, Asmahan, I told you about the girl I used to be in love with before I left here, the time I grabbed hold of her by the hair when we were visiting an old fort and said, ‘Don’t wait for me. I don’t want to stand in your way. When I come back, we’ll see if you still love me.’ ”

He takes hold of my hair and says, “I grabbed a handful of her hair and put my mouth on hers and kissed her so hard I almost suffocated her.”

He puts his lips on mine and kisses me hard and doesn’t suffocate me; I kiss him back.

We stand by the garden pond breathing in the diesel fumes from the generators. He asks me why we’ve filled up the pond with stones. I remember how I never used to be able to get to sleep unless I could hear the sound of the water running from its little tap. I can picture what the tap looked like; the neighbors’ son Bahij, who’s about twelve, broke it off; metal is his obsession and he takes away anything movable made out of metal and sells it; he was known as Bahij the Metal. Jawad puts his arm around me as I tell him about
the pond and Bahij the Metal, and presses my shoulder. I seem to have been expecting it. I want to throw myself on him, I don’t care where, just throw myself on top of him with all my weight. But I remain frozen, even though I haven’t felt like this since my first dance with an adolescent boy.

He is going in two days. Why do relationships require physical contact to develop? Why can’t this continue when we are far apart? I picture myself writing letters, waiting for his. When I try to imagine what I would write, I can hardly think of anything. For he has already preserved his days here: the plains reaching to the horizon, the vine trellises, the blackened landscapes, the rocky hilltops. He found out about the contradictions when he called his girlfriend in France from the post office in the neighboring village. He didn’t believe that on a hillside in this devastated land a post office had been built, fully equipped and staffed. Up above, it was a beehive where the bees still returned to swarm. Nobody dared to go there but Hashim, who launched a surprise attack on the hive, roping himself to the rocks above and swinging down the rock face to reach the honeycomb.

I drew my lip from between his and went into my room without a word. I threw myself down on the bed, picking up the mirror which I left there before dinner, when I was trying to see what he saw in my face. But it didn’t bother me anymore; the electricity was off and I wasn’t going to switch on the generator, because I couldn’t stand the thought of the noise. What’s more, I was trying to be like a mole and pick up every movement Jawad made. The neighborhood generators had gone quiet because of the lateness of the hour, although the noise of the nightclub was still loud in my ears.
I chased away the images and tried to make myself indifferent, saying out loud, “People have to live a little.”

I didn’t think about the nightclub for long, because I was wondering whether my body was alerted by love or wine. Why didn’t he knock on my door? Why couldn’t I hear him in the kitchen or the living room? I jumped up suddenly as if I was supposed to be meeting him and had forgotten about it. When I opened my bedroom door, I heard his voice from the living room asking me how to make the electricity come on. The thought that Ruhiyya must be coming back any moment flew out of my head the moment he came near me, so that the darkness entered us both and we vanished like the things around us, of which only the vaguest outlines were visible, or perhaps we just knew they were there but couldn’t really see them. I was losing myself suddenly, losing the thread which tied me down to life, and flying like a bird. Our conversation became bolder as if it didn’t really count because we were in the dark. My body took me by surprise as usual and I felt it begin to throb, and I smiled because Jawad couldn’t see what was happening to me. We both became bolder and our breathing was like the light suddenly being switched on to reveal everything. His fingers reached out to touch my face, and I knew they were what I’d been waiting for all those years; they blotted out the music and noise, the faces with too much makeup, the mouths full of food and the gyrating stomachs; this tenderness was all that was left.

As we moved in close together and I felt his breath on my face where his fingers had been, he asked me in a whisper if he could go on, and how I was feeling. I liked this hesitation, which I had never encountered in the others, this circumspection,
this strength of will. The war here and his life in Europe hadn’t given him the feeling that everything was permissible, all the barriers down. The fact that I was lying here like this had no connection with the war and the lack of permanence. I had moved far away from the living room floor, my grandmother’s house, the western sector. The desire to hold onto him wasn’t like a drug, or because life went on and there was always someone somewhere being born or dying or having sex. I was lying on the carpet where I used to play as a child, and which I used to race across to go to school or meet a friend in my adolescence. For the first time I wasn’t shutting off my feelings of love and desire as I entered the house, or transforming them into daydreams.

I discover that making love isn’t as easy as it used to be. I’m far away despite my desire for him, expecting far more than this kissing and touching and holding. I take hold of my mass of thoughts and it’s like picking up a heavy bird which has begun to walk rapidly along a piano keyboard sounding a jumble of different notes. This closeness has put a bubble in my veins and started to shift the sluggish blood along and make me breathe more deeply, restoring some spontaneity where before was only grim determination. I crave his lips, my hands grip his shoulders, his chest crushes me, and his face is immersed in mine, but more than sex this is a way to great calm, as if existence had been poised on one foot and has at last regained its balance. Jawad’s eyes look into the distance, then focus on me. I pull him to me and call out loud, “I love you. I love you.”

He must be wondering why I’m not trembling with pleasure, what’s stopping me even responding to him if I love
him as I cry out that I do. Is everything in me blocked and sterile like my work, my future, my car engine which cuts out as soon as I turn the key in the ignition? Do I breathe like a spinster? Have I got the body of a dried-up old maid, although I feel as slippery as if I’ve oiled myself inside? Of course I was talking to him as I chased the bird which hopped over the piano keys, shifting from black to white; I talk to him in my head as he continues to crouch over me, embracing me, marveling that despite all the heat I’m giving off, I’m not in time with him. I wish I could tell him that I can really feel him, not only inside me but to the very ends of my body and all around it, but I want more than this cohesion of muscle, tendon, bone joint. “More, more, more,” I mumble, and he gets up and walks about the room.