Beirut Blues (39 page)

We found ourselves relaxing suddenly. We weren’t going to fail Ali: we’d drink the lemonade and behave as if we were used to VIP lounges.

I watched the women in the latest European fashions, and felt like an outsider. The world seemed to have entered a new era without me.

Jawad insisted on us going back to the ordinary departure
lounge to inquire about our flight. Everything looked far away, colorless, and the sky was not blue but gray, behind a thin covering of mist. The mountains rose in the distance beyond the red sandstone hills whose beauty seemed to take Jawad by surprise.

I felt dislike for everyone I saw. All I could hear was people talking about visas and Canada, Canada. Jawad came back and pointed out a thickset man who was leaving Detroit for Canada. His brother had already left and gone to Switzerland via Italy and was working as a waiter. Emigrating. He’s emigrating. Emigration.

I wanted to guard against a sentimental view of this emigration. Most of them were leaving in search of work, not to escape the violence. They looked healthy and many were smiling. It wasn’t the kind of exodus we ready about in history or were used to seeing on documentaries: people fleeing as aircraft droned overhead, pouring along roads and onto troopships, their faces wretched with hunger. Ours was different. We packed suitcases. Shut up our houses. Reserved airplane seats and cabins. It wasn’t how we emigrated but where to which was surprising. Leftists went reluctantly to the States because Arab countries would no longer accept them. Intellectuals lived in the Gulf, whose people and way of life they had always criticized.

The firm ground beneath my feet is starting to shift uneasily. I am afraid of the lost-looking old couple, because I sense a fellow feeling, although they talk anxiously and in loud voices, whereas my speech is subdued. They will transfer their worries to their sons, who’ll be waiting for them at the other end, and I’ll take refuge with Jawad, who thinks it
is such a straightforward, normal thing for me to leave Beirut. I’ll throw myself on his mercy, if only for a few days. As far back as I can remember, I haven’t made anyone take responsibility for me except Isaf when I was a child, and it’s been other people unloading their troubles onto me. That was how I liked it, and this dependence on Jawad makes me feel naked, as if my body is light and empty and will break up and blow away at the least puff of wind.

The seat was uncomfortably hot and my clothes stuck to the worn leather. I began to think seriously about what sort of life I would lead in France. I felt as if I was gradually emerging from a dream. What was I doing there? Was it really enough that he said to me, “Don’t worry. Things will sort themselves out”? Would I look for a job in some boring Franco-Arab establishing? At the start I’d have to rely entirely on him. Why had my family put their trust in their lands and possessions instead of ready money?

I remembered a friend of mine who had gone to the States to study during the war. She was so keen to be independent from her family that she shared a single damp room with another student in a street whose buildings were collapsing from the misery and poverty and violence they witnessed. In exile, everyday things did not just exist alongside the people or as part of the structure of the house. Even drinking water cost money, and tea bags were used more than once. After a few months she was forced to move in with her sister in another state to save money, but of course this had its own price. Her sister criticized her for sleeping till ten in the morning and my friend claimed it was because she hadn’t slept properly for so long in Beirut. Really it was
because she stayed in bed trying to put the pieces of herself together again and forget the destruction and disillusion she had left behind her against the background of competing television channels. She couldn’t get used to spending her days in shopping malls, or staring idly through the window watching her nephew kicking a football. Her sister told her she was too fond of herself, and she wondered where this self was to like or dislike. One morning she woke up to the sound of hammering: her sister’s husband was making a worktable for her. She was delighted; she would take up drawing and painting again, although the view from the window only made her think of old age and loneliness. On either side of her sister’s garden she could see elderly Americans mowing their green laws. But more than anything she was pleased, because she thought her sister and brother-in-law had at last realized what she was going through and were trying to encourage her back to her art. The feeling didn’t last: she found out that this table had been made for her so that she would start being realistic, as her sister said, and set up a stall in the Saturday market, selling Lebanese pastries, just like the Mexican neighbors who made tortillas to sell.

Jawad looked at his watch. “She’ll be getting anxious now.”

I smiled at him, wondering how he could love two women at the same time. Would I have to put up with it if I hadn’t been old currency, obsolete but still around, with faint traces of its former charms clearly visible? I took out my handbag mirror, examined my face, and abandoned my idea of myself as old currency.

I felt the tiredness spreading into my joints, and although
I tried to stop myself, I wished I were in bed at home or lying comfortably on the sofa listening to the neighbors’ cat meowing. The passengers I had been watching for the last few hours must have contributed to weakening my resolve. I wouldn’t let them do this to me. I told myself I would know what I had to do once I got to France. I would start caring what happened to me again, work, study, learn about computers. I’d find a room that suited me. I asked Jawad whom he socialized with there.

“Nobody much. A few artists,” he replied.

I would refuse to get to know other Lebanese. I didn’t want to become like them, missing kibbeh with tomatoes. Like Hayat.

I have to stop wavering. I don’t have any alternative but to leave now. Why am I allowing myself to forget that I felt like a stranger even in my own home? Didn’t I begin these letters by saying that I was a hostage in a place where I no longer understood what people were saying? What’s changed? Why do I think my fellow passengers look like stupid sheep?

When Jawad goes home to France and draws back the curtains, he will find it difficult to know where he is, seeing that he lives in the past and spends his time worrying about it. He will walk along in the cold and see suns everywhere hanging from bunches of grapes and lampposts fixed to militia points and colored leaflets floating down through the skies; people he’s forgotten he ever met will pop up like jack-in-the-boxes. Even if the war hadn’t happened, he would have felt this nostalgia for the past.

“Why go back to places if they’re preserved in your memory?” I asked him once in the shadows of the garden.

“I visit them in the flesh to see how much they’ve changed and how much I’ve changed. Even if I tried, I couldn’t live here anymore and I feel the places themselves don’t want me, but they’re always in my mind and they stop me being content. They won’t let me rest.”

“But they’re one of the main reasons for your success, aren’t they?” I said consolingly, delighted to hear that he suffered a little.

“I know. I pick the bitter fruits of war and write in a Western language about the emotions which lie between my language and my conscience. The more successful I am, the more my conscience troubles me, because I always used to long for this country to be destroyed.”

For the first time I seemed to see Beirut as it really was: a ball inside a ball inside a ball. Dark halls and passages opening into one another endlessly. Unlike most of us, Jawad had chosen his life, or rather gone racing down the path which had opened in front of him. Chance decides how we are inspired to choose one course of action over another. I was conscious that I had reached middle age without noticing. The war was like an express train hurtling along without a stop, taking everything with it. It had deprived me of the opportunity of using the past to live in the present and give shape to the future.

Jawad is scared that the plane won’t take off, and I am scared of admitting that I want to go on providing nourishment for his sentences. He only sees what is in his camera
lens and recorded in his notebook. I don’t want to become like him, collecting situations and faces and objects, recording what people around me say, to give my life some meaning away from here. I don’t want to keep my country imprisoned in my memory. For memories, however clear, are just memories obscured and watered down by passing time. There are many empty corners between remembering and forgetting. I want things to be as they are, exposed to the sun and air, not hidden in the twists and turns of my mind. For the first time I wonder if Jawad is insisting on taking me with him, as Hayat wanted to in the past, to be a link with his home, for him to hang onto when he needs it, like a baby’s pacifier.

But what about these war years? If I go, they’ll flow away like wastewater. And if I don’t go, but connect this moment up to the distant past, ignoring the long years of war in between, the burning streams will rise up around me demanding: “What have you achieved? How did you live?”

Jawad is afraid that the aircraft won’t take off; I’m afraid that it will, scared to own up that I feel sad because I’m about to put the war behind me; as if I am not a witness to those who have come and gone and those who have stayed: Maronites, Druzes, Shiites, Palestinians, Syrians, French, Ottomans, Crusaders, the Lebanese Army, the Sixth Fleet, and the Israelis wanting “Peace for Galilee.” How can I put years of patient waiting, fear, and astonishment behind me? Naser made me greet the war gladly like him; Simon showed it to me at close quarters; and now Jawad is trying to take me away from it. What is peace? I carry my war with me wherever I go. I can hear bullets spraying around us now,
although the sky is quiet, the mountains are peaceful, and the airport is full of cheerful noise. I want to go back to the house and garden and familiar faces, to the pleasurable feeling when the fighting stops of getting dressed at last and doing my hair. If I try to pin down what made me happy, forcing myself to look back, I have to acknowledge my hypocrisy: I see myself trying to hide from the noise of the battles which pounded through my head until I wanted to scream for help; lying in bed in the darkness able to make out the peeling paintwork, the furniture from my father’s apartment building piled up against the wall, the broken mirrors, the books going back to another age. The house was no longer as it used to be, alive and waiting, with a presence as real and distinctive as our faces.

It upsets me to think I can even consider staying behind, and I want to put my arms around Jawad. When I look at him, all the little physical details I’ve come to know so well crowd in on me and I have a lump in my throat. The dimple in his chin, the single white hair in his eyebrow, his collarbone where it sticks out slightly. How would I be able to sleep soundly ever again, or wake up, without feeling the pain of losing him? Deliberately I picture myself walking around the streets and quays after Naser had left, when I couldn’t get his features out of my mind, and he seemed to have left traces of himself in so many different places. I followed him to the cities by the sea, and when at last he sat opposite me, I was still searching for him. Losing him had split me in two and I had to find the other part of me to believe that he was really there before me. I let my hand pass over the individual pores of his skin, without actually touching
him, gazing at the little hairs between his eyebrows, the purplish mole on his neck, the thick eyelashes, stained teeth, brown hands. His wrists were surprisingly slender for someone of his build. Looking at it all set me on edge as if the dentist were probing around in my mouth, and yet I felt detached. Even the voice which used to caress me had become a hollow echo of my memory, bouncing off the lemonade glass, not the voice which triggered off passion when it said, “My darling,” and desire when it murmured, “I’ve missed you. I’ve missed you.”

I knew from the pen in his shirt pocket, even from the color of his shirt, from the portable phone, the way he glanced down the bill before paying it, the tone of voice in which he asked about Beirut, that it was over between us, and that I should have decided this for myself when he left the first time, when the Israelis entered Beirut and Lebanon became a different place, and the Palestinians were thrown into disarray. Inside me I suppose I had known it was over, but needed to weep over the corpse before I could make a new start.

Jawad comes up and announces irritably that the flight will be postponed if the aircraft doesn’t take off within the next two hours, because the airport in Paris won’t accept it after a certain time of night. Unlike me, he hadn’t remained nailed to his seat waiting, but instead seemed to have become hyperactive; the war hadn’t taught him, as it had taught us, either to be in a state of readiness, forgetting everything but trying to stay alive, or to be grateful for the calm periods and make the best of them.

The announcement of a flight to Amman rekindled his
enthusiasm. “What do you think about taking any plane out?”

“I’ve only got a visa for France, and Lebanese need them for everywhere these days.” Then I added to comfort him, “They told you the flight might be canceled so you wouldn’t keep asking them. They’d lose a lot of money if they didn’t fly.”

I gave him my hand and felt myself relax. The warmth of it distracted me from the thoughts which had been pitching me to and fro like waves on a turbulent sea, and all I wanted was to be close to him—and how close I was going to be in Paris! He fidgeted restlessly, drew his hand away, and stood up. Perhaps if I’d been able to read his mind I would have seen that he was wishing he was alone so that he could take any flight out. I would never know what was going on in his head.

As I look around me now, everything seems normal. Even the sight of my shoes reassures me. Medium heels, navy blue: an indication of how peaceful life his become here. However hard I try to summon up the sounds of the fighting, and the fear, isolation, and despair they create, I can only think that the violence won’t return, that the past has really gone for good, leaving behind this pleasant numbness which is rising up from the tips of my toes and spreading all over me. I yawn continually and wonder if I’m too relaxed and peaceful to pick up my suitcase and make my way out to the airplane, never mind endure the trials of the journey. I rise to my feet with difficulty and stand facing him. Gently I take the camera from him and put it down, then take hold of his hands and bend my head over them, indifferent to the
crowded airport, kissing the palms and pressing them to my face. The tears come however much I try to hold them in, and splash onto his hands. I wipe them away before I stand face-to-face with him, and tell him that I’ve changed my mind and I’m not going with him.