Beirut Blues (7 page)

Don’t worry, Jill Morrell. Your boyfriend won’t come to any harm in these battles. Things will change. The current deranged bombardment of the city will stop, they’ll gather up the bodies, the Red Cross or the Red Crescent will take the wounded to the hospital, and they’ll announce a cease-fire, temporary or long-term.

This is the problem. That things go back to being exactly as they were, and all they’ve done is added a great deal of salt to the wound. What’s going on now has no connection with anyone but the fighters. Who’s going to take a war of the streets and alleys seriously, and care about its outcome?

I don’t believe I’ll think about anything beyond the confines of my room. But I have to stop myself sneaking a glance through a gap in the garden wall at a house which is said to be occupied by party members. The night was calm, and everyone was asleep. I saw the fighters sleeping with
their families. I could almost hear them snoring. I lowered my head and wondered if I had really been kidnapped. Perhaps I was still having a bad dream. People sleeping peacefully couldn’t be kidnappers. Then I reminded myself that evil sleeps too.

My Dear Naser,

You’re on my mind again, and if I hadn’t been distracted by the tank parked outside, I’d have been worrying that you were going to fall ill or die. Something always seems to happen to the people I have strong thoughts or dreams about and I hear of it sooner or later. I know these ideas have been ingrained in me since childhood by the women around me, and if I really believed them, nobody I knew would still be alive. I’ve often tried to curb my premonitions, but then I think that they might sometimes turn out to be for the good.

My mother not only dismissed such beliefs but made them a subject of ridicule in the cassettes she regularly sent to Fadila: first, her gentle voice sings a verse of a folk song, then there are some gasps of laughter, then she says, “What a miserable life it is here! Everything’s so proper, we’ve even stopped being superstitious!” After that she tells the story of her brother-in-law who runs a hotel laundry and washes the
sheets as the guests depart; so far none of them has fallen out of an airplane or met his or her end under the wheels of fast-moving vehicles on the way home.

I’ve told myself it’s just the circumstances making you surface in my thoughts again, although I was crossing my fingers or knocking on wood at the same time. My head’s like a book whose characters fade and disappear from one chapter to the next, then reemerge in all their clarity to inhabit the pages again. Except that in the really bad times and when I fear for my sanity, I tend to think about things that are remote from events around me. For example, when the battles were in full swing and the girl next door came around in the hope of some moral support, I asked her why she didn’t knit me a shawl, then I fetched the brass pestle and mortar so we could grind chickpeas and make something nice to eat. She was amazed by my suggestions and panicked every time she heard an explosion, but once I’d convinced her the shelter was deadly and staying in the house could be pleasant, she settled down, despite Zemzem’s constant shouting: “They’re all crazy! Thugs! Savages! Hell, we’re going to die.”

I’d even begun to find the sound of Zemzem’s footsteps intolerable, so to relieve my feelings I tried to annoy her: “Hell’s a lovely word,” I teased. “You can imagine devils or bad angels prodding people with big forks, their eyes blazing, their faces yellow and thin.”

I’m used to Zemzem being confused or uncertain, but I couldn’t stand her wailing, beating her chest, shrieking, and turning around in circles like a dog chasing its tail. Since the battles had started up again she had been imploring us constantly
to leave the city not for the village, but for Egypt or Syria.

“Do you want people to feel sorry for us,” my grandmother would remark, “and say how dreadful, they’ve abandoned their houses and are wandering here and there like vagrants?”

“Listen to her! You think people would pity you if you went abroad? They’d be jealous.”

Gunfire shook the house. We were each in our separate rooms. Zemzem’s wailing preceded her as she came into my room; when she saw a book in my hands, she backed away as if I were pointing a deadly weapon at her: “In the name of God the Compassionate, the Merciful!” she exclaimed.

She hurried to my grandmother, who was reading a prayer book by candlelight, and asked her if there was a special prayer to stop the fighting. My grandmother was suddenly tired of Zemzem and told her to find a family who’d take her abroad with them.

Zemzem quivered as if she’d touched a live socket. “You mean you can do without me,” she said tremulously, “now that you’ve drained all my strength? When I first came to you, I was as fresh as a head of basil.”

I began to feel sorry for her. “My grandmother’s talking like that because she’s upset,” I called. “She’s scared you’ll go away and leave her.”

Suddenly I see Zemzem as a stranded fish on a dried-up riverbed trying to find a little pool of water among the weeds and pebbles. Her backbone has begun to curve and she’s crying out for oxygen. Without my grandmother and our way of life Zemzem couldn’t survive. But perhaps I am
wrong, for the days have long gone when Zemzem was proud just to sit next to my grandmother in the car, or at home when she was receiving guests.

We heard the door rattle as she slammed it violently shut behind her. “If only we had taught her to cry, ‘No Amal! No Hizbullah! Imam Ali is God’s chosen one!’ ” said my grandmother. Then she began to repeat softly to herself, “No Amal and no Hizbullah. Imam Ali is God’s chosen one.”

A demonstration! Was it possible? Even the word had an alien ring, for it was a reminder of more normal times. Was Zemzem taking part in a demonstration wearing her house slippers and caftan? I heard my grandmother coughing a little in her room. How weak she has become. She’s no longer a djinn. Perhaps it’s because she’s stopped wearing her big flowing white dresses and white silk kerchiefs as if she’s just returned from the pilgrimage to Mecca, and these days she doesn’t powder her pale face in the theatrical way she used to.

For the previous three days we hadn’t moved from our rooms; then we heard a dreadful explosion. We all screamed and rushed out calling to each other. When the three of us almost collided in the landing, we burst out laughing. Flames were coming from the storeroom and I raced my grandmother to the door. A metal object lay innocently on the floor there in the midst of the destruction. It resembled a thick, dry branch. “Come on, let’s cook it,” I said to my grandmother.

Laughing, she said fondly that I had my mother’s sense of humor so I felt obliged to tell her that it was plagiarized from a book of poems I’d been reading:

My mother decided recently

That if a rocket came into our kitchen

She would hollow it out

Drop it in the dish she uses for stuffed courgettes

Cook it with shrapnel rice

And a handful of our pine-nut fingers

And we would invite the fighters

To the most delicious feast

They’d ever tasted.

I looked around me again and felt a sudden hatred and revulsion for our house. How could it have conspired to let the bomb penetrate its concrete walls and land in this unlikely place between the store cupboards and the sacks of cracked wheat? I had believed in common with many others, including those who manned the guns, that I was protected by some magic armor and the violence couldn’t touch me.

Zemzem returned with the news that the Syrian tanks were about to enter the area; Fadila had locked her nephew Ricardo in the house and gone on the demonstration too. She had shouted at the Syrians and beat her breast, drawing attention to herself, so—as Zemzem remarked grimly—they would be sure to remember her face when they were searching for Hizbullah fighters. Zemzem was like a monkey in a banana store, uncertain where to begin. She kept telling us again and again that the whole neighborhood was preparing to leave. In the days that followed, we discovered how right she had been, for the savagery of the combat had reached our doorsteps and the noise of the bombardment pounded in our ears nonstop.

I was thinking I had to escape this battle noise outside, and inside was no better: my grandmother dreamed of picking cherries in green orchards, or standing on Mount Arafat, or floating on a marble sea, and Zemzem begged aloud, “For God’s sake, someone take me away from here! Even if it’s the Angel of Death shaking my yellow leaf off the tree, that’ll do, if it’s the only way I can get some peace.”

So I suppose I was ready for the knocking on the door. All the same, we were amazed that there could be someone there, and it made more of an impact than the mad cacophony in the street. My heart lifted and I hoped it was a brave knight who had heard of the princess who never sleeps and had brought his sword to cut through the bullet-thorns. I heard Ali’s voice, “Hurry up and open the door.”

I smiled and opened the door eagerly to him.

“Did you really think Ali had forgotten you?” he cried.

“We would never think such a thing!” I replied, overjoyed.

This affectionate reception seemed to embarrass him, for he said quickly, but not without pride, “Come along. I’ve come to take you to the village. Hurry. Get yourselves ready.”

My grandmother called out to him, as usual wanting to hang on to her role even in circumstances like these. Like a minister of war questioning her frontline commanders, she demanded, “What’s the news? Who’s winning? What’s going to happen?”

“You’ve only got a few minutes,” answered Ali impatiently.
“It’s dragging on. They’ll be wading in blood up to their knees.”

“It would be all right if it was only to the knees,” answered my grandmother.

“Nobody’s asked me how I’m going to get you there,” I heard him shouting from the living room. “I’ve brought a tank for you. You heard! A tank!”

It made no difference to me whether it was a tank or the blessed horse, Buraq of the gilded wings, which transported the Prophet to heaven. What mattered was that I went somewhere where I could be out of range of Zemzem’s voice and my grandmother’s labored breathing. I called back hypocritically, “A tank, Ali!”

He interrupted me proudly. “Yes, that’s right, Miss Asmahan. A damn great tank.”

I gathered all my Billie Holiday records into a plastic bag and put them with my underclothes, a couple of skirts, some blouses, and a packet of sanitary napkins. I knew that was the one thing the village shop often didn’t have. Once when I was complaining about there not being any when I needed them, Zemzem remarked that people in the village were sensible, unlike people in the city, who wasted their money on bodily filth.

I heard a shout from my grandmother and then an anguished cry from Zemzem. Zemzem was in a state, “trilling up her own arse, no better than a tinker,” according to my grandmother. Her desire to leave the house and take refuge anywhere as long as it was away from the violence was matched only by her inability to leave when it came to it. She
went around in circles, not knowing what to take with her, what to leave behind, frightened for the house, and reluctant to abandon all the things she had cherished.

Although I was glad to be going, I hesitated and didn’t follow Ali straight out to board the tank. It seemed as if I was running away and was afraid of criticism, even though I had anticipated it. Was it your reaction which concerned me, or the neighbors’? But they were in the shelters. I dawdled along, trying to reassure myself: was I scared of the cats who had begun to know what the war meant, or of the twisted streetlamps?

Ali tried to hurry us along. His saliva sprayed the air. His tone had grown more commanding and decisive in these last few years, since he left our service. He had been our driver and acted as general handyman to the family in Beirut until the war came.

I wanted to take my time leaving, but I heard Ali shouting at Zemzem because as well as the suitcase he had allowed her, she had brought the quail in its cage. I hurried out. My grandmother was shouting at Zemzem too.

“Let’s go. A rocket’s going to hit this tank any moment now,” said Ali.

He watched Zemzem running to a neighbor’s house to leave the quail, swearing that he wouldn’t take her with us and she didn’t deserve any sympathy. My grandmother was in a state of wonder because Zemzem had become a human being in her eyes: she had left the Moulinex and brought the bird.

Zemzem’s voice rang out again, letting us know she was on her way. As she came up Ali reproached her for not
leaving the bird at his house. “Why should I? I don’t know you,” she retorted. “For all I know you’d quite happily slaughter it and pluck it and eat it raw.”

My grandmother asked her if she had left it with Zakiyya, but Zemzem didn’t answer her, merely muttering regretfully, “God forgive you all.”

Then my grandmother asked her if she had turned the key in the lock. She had already asked her the same question as we were coming down the short flight of steps into the garden, and Zemzem had answered that she had fastened both locks. Although everybody was making such a noise, I couldn’t help noticing the smell of the frangipani still growing in our garden, its branches hanging over the wall into the street. But this time it was mixed with the smell of the gunpowder which had turned the purple bougainvillea black. The buildings around us were pockmarked by bullets, immense leopards with their spotted skins. A room in a nearby house had no outside wall. It was still painted blue with a dining table and chairs in the middle of it. It looked beautiful, as if it were suspended between heaven and earth. “Ali, what happened to those people?” said my grandmother. “They were so nice.”

“I don’t know,” shouted Ali. “Get in, for God’s sake, can’t you?”

The neighborhood was quiet, as if it was resting after yesterday’s rowdy party, when fireworks had flashed and sparkled in the sky for hours on end. A building hung its head wearily, its water pipes like coiled black snakes. A lamppost leaned over as if it were trying to kiss the ground. Smoke continued to rise in the air and hung there like a black
cloud in spring. A red tile lay like a child’s toy waiting to be built into some forgotten palace. The huge metal door of the shop was like a Chinese fan with its folds pressed out. The balconies tottered on broken legs.