Beirut Blues (35 page)

After a long silence I put on a shocked voice and say, “Imagine if the electricity came back on now and Ruhiyya saw you.”

“I wish I could understand what is the matter with you,” he says.

I used to be certain that I would be all over Jawad like ink on a white sheet, spreading out and running in every direction until I was part of the fabric, so what is happening to me? Has seeing life diminished by the terrible dancing creatures in the nightclub made me wither like a flower snapped off a bush?

We couldn’t begin a discussion: it was difficult if I didn’t know what was wrong with me; but he took my face tenderly in his hands again and asked if I wanted him to carry me to my bed.

I clung to his neck as he picked me up and almost
dropped me. I remembered Naser’s back pains, then quickly drove the thought from my mind, as I usually did when it concerned Naser. I smiled to hear Jawad saying, “Good heavens. How heavy you are. Like a lump of concrete.”

“Is she as heavy as me?” I tease.

He says nothing.

“Soon you’ll be carrying her around.”

He throws me onto the bed. The metal springs bounce me back towards him. A wave of happiness rushes over me. My bed is different, laughing as it receives me with the one I love. We are in the house which thinks it’s there for everything but lovemaking. It witnesses births, marriages, deaths, people moving in and moving out, but not love. It’s not used to lovers joining in the room of childhood and adolescence; they go far away so that they can let their bodies do as they please.

As I think these thoughts, I feel the house embracing me suddenly, giving out its warmth to me. The furniture watches and greets the union with gladness, breathing softly around us. I have not felt this relaxed with any man before. My roving encounters with Naser hardly made our relationship secure; there was no bed which we used habitually, no sofa whose color stuck in my mind, no room which brought back certain words. Terror lurked constantly at the back of my mind and in the corners of my lips at the thought that his enemies might choose these intimate moments to attack.

Jawad touches my lips again, my arms, and releases me from the throng of thoughts and images and makes them lie dormant.

I followed him seconds after he had left for his own bed,
and he was waiting for me; he made a space for me when he heard my footsteps, put his arm around me, and asked me, “Do girls here leave things to nature or do they use something?”

I just laughed, and then he began to breathe regularly so that I knew he was asleep. I studied his face; I was a little girl and this was my grandfather breathing reassuringly beside me, and everything was all right: the top window had been broken by local boys with a sling, not by sniper fire. Then I hear Jawad’s voice as if in a dream, telling me that I’m just like my mother and that’s how he recognized me after all these years.

He was a child when my mother visited them, in a long brown split skirt with a fox fur around her shoulders and dark red lipstick. She smoked a cigarette which she hid each time she heard footsteps, sings songs and laughed loudly. This image of her stayed in his mind for a long time afterwards.

He puts his arms around me. “It’s incredible,” he whispers. “Here I am with her daughter. It must be fate.”

I lay without moving. I wanted to turn over as usual but I was afraid of disturbing him. I must have fallen asleep in the end, because I woke up and the light was streaming into the room and I heard Ruhiyya moving about in the kitchen. A feeling of sadness overwhelmed me when I saw his suitcase. I tried to extricate myself from the embrace of his arms and thighs but he held me tighter. “You can’t go,” he muttered, his eyes tightly shut.

“Ruhiyya,” I said, pretending to be flustered.

“Let her see us together. She can make up a song about us.”

As I try to get up I want to ask him if he loves me, but I can’t bring myself to, then the sight of our limbs entwined under the cover gives me courage and I wonder how I could have felt shy.

The Last Letter

My Dear Hayat,

Although these long days passing have created a gulf between us, you’re still my friend Hayat, the wall off which I bounce my thoughts—happy, painful, immoral sometimes—and yet I never detect any scorn in your eyes. Do I? I think I see only love. How wrong I was when I convinced myself that we had set off along two parallel tracks which would never meet again: the very fact that if I feel uneasy about something I can only dispel it by analyzing your circumstances in relation to mine means you are still there.

You are with me now in the departure lounge of Beirut International Airport. Do you remember the word “International” huge and black on its walls? The point is, I’m trying to ask your advice, but you disappear just as I’m about to hear your reply. Or is it that I don’t want to hear it? I’m sitting here now, a mass of confusion, uncertain whether to focus on Jawad, myself, the waiter, or the other passengers,
and I see you pushing them all aside and coming towards me. It’s strange: you who are far away occupy my thoughts now, and not those I have just left who must be somewhere around the airport, waiting for my plane to take off. Is it because I always connect you with this airport, as I normally only come here to meet you or see you off, and it sometimes seems as if people only leave here to take things to you?

You never let slip an opportunity to urge me to leave too; I hear your voice, read your letters: you’re like a school headmistress trying to rustle up business with an enthusiasm which can be troublesome, and make me feel sometimes I am being hounded by you, although I never need to ask why. I know you can’t understand why I stay in the flames while where you live even the sound of people’s voices is calm and reassuring. I know you’re afraid for me, but this fear must be accompanied by some pangs of conscience and the flames spread to create a dense wall between those who have stayed and those who have left. This feeling must have disturbed your stays here and made you wish you were far away from all the commotion, enjoying an atmosphere where the biggest disturbances were caused by thunderstorms.

Even during periods of calm in Beirut, when the sky was closer to its original blue, you were telling me to leave. I realized then from the tone of your voice that you weren’t afraid of me dying or missing out on a husband or a future, but you were scared for yourself. Your life had never led you into dark labyrinths before: you were born into an exemplary family; from an early age you were aware that you were being fed with a silver spoon, which had been your mother’s
before you and which you were to preserve so that your own children could use it one day. So you went on dates with boys to compete with other girls, to find out whether your face was pretty and your body desirable, not to find a husband. Even education was not for the sake of knowledge but simply so that you could get a job which would give you a certain status in society.

You used to believe that the world consisted of the earth and the sky, and that everybody lived in beautiful houses, which they made beautiful if they were ordinary, then produced children forever and ever. Death would never dare enter the solid walls of your family house, disrupt its order, mar its beauty. So as soon as war broke out you packed your bags without stopping for a moment to ask what was going on or who had unleashed this violence. You were more concerned about whether the airport would be blown to bits. Now, my dear, the people mix ash with water because soap is so expensive, and water is scarce. I think how I used to wash my hair with clean water every day not so long ago, ignoring Zemzem’s instructions to be sparing and only use it for vital washing.

I used to listen to you insisting that you were really happy, and so were your children, and repeating your invitation to me. When I tried to find out what your life was really like, you seemed at a loss and I drew my own conclusions.

“My life?” you would say after a bit. “It’s the same as usual. Yesterday I went to an exhibition and was introduced to someone in the art world here, then I went to a movie in the afternoon and enrolled in a yoga club.”

As time went by, the tone of your voice changed. You’d
been in exile longer and you must have found out that you were only on the fringes of life in this Western country: its politics didn’t concern you and its social problems had no effect on you. The weather was about the only thing you remarked on to its inhabitants; it brought you closer to them, although you couldn’t handle it the same way they did; you were still tied into a four-season cycle and if a heat wave struck in early spring, you were thrown into disarray, for you’d put your summer clothes in trunks like you did in Lebanon. Only when you got a job did you become part of the place, but it didn’t change you or even affect the tone in which you spoke, except for the note of weariness creeping in. “What am I doing? The same as usual. Work and more work. Movies, galleries, yoga.”

But then you began to sound more discontented, asking me enviously if I’d had kibbeh in yogurt recently, even though you’d told me before that you’d met Olga, a Lebanese cook, who came to you once a week and cooked everything you wanted. You began telephoning me, telling the Lebanese exchange when you booked the calls that it was a matter of life and death, and writing disjointed letters as if you were a doctor trying to take the pulse of an anxious patient without him noticing. You would ask me about daily life in Lebanon, the state of security, the electricity, the schools, and I guessed that before you decided whether to return, you were seeing how the land lay, like a bird poised above an island reconnoitering the terrain before it descends. I try to dampen your enthusiasm. “You? In Beirut?” I gasp. “You wouldn’t last a day. And your children? Not a second. Things are still very difficult. Don’t come now.”

By reacting like this I gave myself an aura of superiority, as if I were better equipped than you to bear the upheavals and disasters. At the time, I didn’t know why I wasn’t encouraging you to return, even though conditions were fine and hopes were emerging that the war might be a thing of the past. It seems to me now that I really believed we existed like two parallel lines, and I wanted to be free in the new Beirut, at first with Naser, then with others; I needed to be certain that the old ties which had unconsciously dominated me in the past did not carry on into the present. I blamed myself for not encouraging you to come back every time I sat by the sea and watched the swimmers enjoying the waves and the sunshine, every time Beirut seemed like a city doing its proper job. I felt your distress when you left, but all the same I did nothing to persuade you to stay; in fact, I probably made you more determined to go, saying untruthfully, “You’re so lucky to be leaving.”

Your desire for familiar company increased daily. You wanted me to drop in on you so you could enjoy your life, warm yourself as if we were around the stove in your village. Do you remember the Feast of Pentecost when you took me with you to the church and there was a fair set up in the churchyard with swings and stalls and the man they said was a bedouin with a complete set of gold teeth, calling, “Buy your sparrow for the feast. It’s not a feast without a sparrow”?

We picked bitter oranges and ate cookies and Turkish Delight and when I went home I spoke like the people in your village.

I don’t think it occurred to you that my presence in your
life in exile would only warm you for a short while because I would soon start to feel the cold like you. It would be like a local anesthetic—the effect would wear off and the syringe would be empty.

You once wrote to me words that remain engraved indelibly on my mind, like a tattoo. “It seems to get more difficult as I and my children get older. Life is harder here, even though you’ve got the war at home. What gloomy future lies in store for us? Abroad you get along with other people on a purely superficial level, but anything else is asking for trouble. The days don’t cut a groove into your memory—it’s as if I get up in the morning and do what I have to do, but never feel more than the faintest glow of pleasure or excitement, and that’s not enough to make life bearable.”

For all that, here I am sitting in the departure lounge of Beirut International Airport. If I told you that I hadn’t thought much about leaving and had decided under Jawad’s influence, you wouldn’t believe me, or if you did you’d reproach me in your heart, wondering how our long friendship had never prompted me to go, while for the sake of a man, and one attracted to another woman, I was sitting on this airport seat with my clothes sticking to me. You’d say to yourself, “Asma was waiting for a man. So that was her problem, and we got it wrong when we were convinced she couldn’t leave Beirut because she wouldn’t survive away from the place for long.”

I know I should have told you about Jawad before. I thought about it, but how could I? For that kind of conversation you need to be face-to-face in some private corner away from prying eyes and listening ears. Do you remember that
when we wanted to make sure Zemzem or your mother couldn’t follow our conversations, we used to talk in riddles and put feminine endings on and change the boys’ names into girls’ names and collapse into fits of laughter? Could I possibly have booked an international call and sat there in line with all those sad and bewildered-looking people? These calls are expensive nowadays and people use them in emergencies—to say someone’s died or is getting married or going away, or to ask for money. Imagine when my turn came, I’d be shouting from the booth, “Hayat, I’m in love with someone called Jawad. When he takes hold of my finger—picture it, just one finger—it blows my mind. When he holds my head, it’s as if he’s putting his hands on everything—the ideas, the confusions, the past, the beauty, the ugliness. When he holds my breasts, I see flashes of light and become as hot as an oven. I think he’s the first to hold my breasts. The others didn’t notice I had them because they’re so small.”

Secrets between friends are ageless. I heard from Zemzem that old Zaynab told Naima how her husband once beat his own head in distress when he found ten liras missing from his pocket. Zaynab had said casually, “What’s all the fuss about? I took it to buy a bundle of mint.”