Beirut Blues (40 page)

I see another face, unconnected to the man with the camera, out of place in this airport; the face of the one who walked with me over the stony ground in the village, who took me in his arms on the floor of my house. His eyes are affectionate, angry, and bewildered at the same time. Then anger takes over as he looks right through me, repeating a single incredulous word: “What? What?”

He collapses onto a seat and takes his head in his hands, muttering like a child who’s lost his toy, “My God! I’m not going to let the plane take off till you decide to come.”

I hadn’t pictured he would react like this; it seemed to have slipped my mind that I hadn’t let him take part in my dialogue with myself, this rag doll hauled to and fro by its arms, as my feelings started playing tricks with me like shadows cast on the ceiling. Throughout my internal debates I had treated Jawad as nothing more than a traveling companion.

He comes close so that his knee touched mine and puts his arm around me. “What’s wrong? Are you angry because I said she’d be starting to worry? Do you want me to choose between you? Shall we get married? Just tell me.”

I wriggle free of his arms, embarrassed because of the people around us, but manage a smile and even a nervous little laugh. “I can’t leave. I can’t.”

“What are you afraid of? Perhaps it’s my fault. I didn’t do enough to set your mind at rest about how you’d live. We didn’t discuss the details. We were preoccupied with the visa and Musa, then with the bride and the airport. You’ve got to tell me what’s happened to you in the last three hours.”

He looks around him in confusion, trying to concentrate on what’s being broadcast over the loudspeaker, then resuming his attempts to make me explain myself, incomprehension and fear in his eyes. “If you’ve changed your mind about me, never mind. But don’t confuse the issues. It shouldn’t stop you leaving.”

I don’t feel the pressure of the war like he does, but I begin to cry, waving my head from side to side.

“What’s this for?”

I’m crying because I don’t know how to stop myself. I lift up my head to look at him, but as soon as I notice the pulse in his jaw, and the trembling of the faint growth of stubble on his chin, I can’t bear the thought of not seeing them again, not hearing the voice which has become part of me, like a skin I’ll never shed.

“I love you very much, but I want to stay in Beirut.”

“You love me but you want to stay in Beirut. Do you mean you want
me
to stay in Beirut? Perhaps it would be better for me. Who knows?”

Stay here and live in the same conditions as me? He’d even lose his delight in words. That’s the effect Beirut has on those who haven’t witnessed its war. It rips the smiles off their faces, then removes their safety helmets, covers their eyes with grimy gauze, daubs their noses with black paste
and their tongues with castor oil, and leaves their bodies for the birds to peck. Then the circle shrinks and the wide expanses of land are reduced to a few meters.

“Perhaps you’d like me to stay?”

“No.” And I tell him what I was thinking.

“Why do you want to put up with it yourself?”

I had read what he’d written in his notebook when he’d left it lying on his seat:

“I’ve discovered that my nostalgia was just because of being a foreigner in France. How I longed for the self I thought was somewhere else. Well, I seem to have spoiled the dream by coming back. I feel as if I’ve never seen this land before and never knew the people. Instead of mountains I saw concrete in a country which has become as black as night: the walls are black, the soldiers are dressed in black. The countryside is charred and burned, and the population is living on top of the biggest arsenal in the world.”

“What do you do here apart from gossip?” he asks me now. “Your whole life’s focused around making sure you have a supply of electricity, water, and food and avoiding the bombs. It’s as if you can only live in this twilight world between war and not-war. This doesn’t have to be what life’s about, you know. There’s a whole big world out there.”

“I don’t want to turn into one of those pathetic creatures who are always homesick, always saying I wish I were still in Beirut. I don’t want to become like you, split between here and there. I know I’m not happy here, but why should I be unhappy in two countries?”

“Why are you thinking of all these things in advance? Try it and then decide.”

“It’s easier living in the middle of what upsets you than running away from it and worrying at a distance. Things seem worse from a distance.”

“I don’t understand why you’re anticipating being depressed in either place. Come, and see how you feel in a few weeks or months.” He pauses wearily, then seems to feel compelled to go on speaking. “Beirut’s an excuse. You hide behind it because you’re scared to begin a new life. I want to help you think about something else besides electricity and water and rediscover the world beyond this place.”

Beirut International Airport. Beirut. I seemed to hear the word for the first time and I repeated it several times. Beirut. I saw it written. I saw it on the map, on postcards. Zaytouna. Ma’rad. Martyrs Square. Riad Al-Solh. On photographs and pictures in foreign books. I saw it written, the letters forming a child’s cart with big wheels, or the collar of my school uniform.

It was as if it had been branded on my mind in the course of the war. Beirut at war takes on bulk and shape. I can hold onto it, whereas in peacetime, life was like a garage full of spare parts and broken-down vehicles and I didn’t know where to begin with it. Now I picture Beirut as a big pit in the ground, all small furrows and hollows and cavities, barren except for clumps of green grass clinging to its sides. I began my letters saying that I was a hostage and now I’m trying to see these little plants growing, as they are all that my land produces. My life is here and every country has its own life.

“You’ve become addicted to this war, you know.”

I say nothing.

“You’re afraid that if you leave here, you’ll no longer be a queen like you were in Beirut, with the neighbors and Fadila and Ricardo. You’re forgetting that your experiences will make you much more interesting than anyone who left at the beginning and has stayed in Paris ever since.”

“They say that to travel is to die a little death. In any case, I’m not in the least curious about life in Paris.”

“Why do you think that is? It’s because you’re lazy, and afraid.”

“Maybe if I’d left before, I’d think differently, but each country has its own way of life and my life is here.”

“What about me? Where do I stand?”

I gather all my hair to one side and chew on my lips and say nothing.

“That’s a stupid question. It’s probably not the right time to ask,” he says.

I saw everything I had left behind in Beirut through a fine veil of nostalgia, perhaps because of the distinctive atmosphere of airports, although I knew I would soon view it once more as a tawdry, run-down circus.

Whenever the pulse in his hand beat faster, I felt the beads of sweat breaking out on me and smelled it mixed with his smell and began to have second thoughts and wonder if what I’d been saying amounted to nothing.

Jawad stops trying to persuade me and just looks at me, then kisses my hand from time to time, punctuating his actions with a shake of the head. He touches my cheek and says he’s already missing me, then takes my hands impulsively in his again and I’m holding them out eagerly like an orphan to touch his lips and feel the currents of desire running
through them, and then he’s saying imploringly that I must follow him tomorrow or the next day.

I’ll follow him now. As soon as our flight is announced I’ll stand up and we’ll go together. I can’t envisage staying here alone, watching him go off without me.

I’m happy to have made this decision and want to surprise him and I’m the one to take his hand this time and bring it up to my face as if I’m telling him what I’ve decided. He, meanwhile, is trying to recover his composure. “What do I have to do to make you leave?” he asks. “Perhaps if you had everything running on batteries, even your hair dryer, you’d find your life here suddenly had no purpose.”

“The suitcase!” we both shout at the same time, suddenly remembering.

“What do you want to do about it?”

So I don’t tell him I’ll come with him after all—as a matter of fact, I relax because he’s accepted the fact that I’m staying, and he seems to think he made the decision himself.

“I’ll leave it—otherwise you’ll be here all day.”

“Good. If you leave your things with me, you’ll have to come and get them.” Then, as if he has caught sight of an image gleaming at him through his camera lens: “Now, what shall I do with your clothes when I get there? I’m going to keep them all mixed up with mine.”

His delight at the prospect of having my things with him annoys me; it seems as if they are a substitute for me, although at least remembering my suitcase has stirred me into action. His face brightens again at the thought of taking it with him, while I try to conceal my regret as I whip through its contents in my mind.

I let them go grudgingly, perhaps to be the silent link between us, their effect on us only becoming clear later. Our conversation seems suddenly to have died: I remember myself as a little girl in my grandmother’s room in the village. My grandmother put me in a new dress and shiny leather shoes and spent ages doing my hair. Then she tucked an artificial rose behind my ear: it was one I’d seen her wearing on many different dresses. To my amazement she passed a finger over her lips, taking a bit of lipstick off them, and dabbed it on my cheeks. Finally she sprinkled me with cologne from her vanity case, then clapped her hands: “Now, go out and show them how pretty you are.”

I went out and stood before the children who’d come from all over the village to see me. They stared at me from a distance, none of them daring to approach the porch. I knew what I thought of them, but not what they thought of me. When my grandmother appeared and smiled encouragingly at them, they scattered. She called them back, and warily they drifted closer, but we didn’t talk, just looked at one another for a while, although judging by their fixed expressions and unblinking eyes, they saw nothing. I stared at their bare feet, the spots and scabs on their legs, their unkempt hair.

I also remembered how Jawad came out of the village café with Munjid’s son and I was waiting for them by the door. He asked me what Ruhiyya wanted him for and I said, “She wants you to marry me.”

Everyone I love is leaving, and also those I don’t love; even the hostages will go one after the other. Jawad asks if he can kiss me on the lips. I refuse, but he gets up from his seat
and kisses me fleetingly on the mouth and I reproach myself, wondering how I can let a man like that go.

When the flight was announced, I left him standing alone in line with his camera and hand luggage. Energy flowed back into my limbs and the blood surged through my body, and once more I went to confront the city which had made its war die of weariness.

About the Translator

Catherine Cobham teaches Arabic at St. Andrews University, Scotland, and has translated a number of contemporary Arab writers, including Yusuf Idris, Liana Badr, and Naguib Mahfouz.