Other Lives (10 page)

I met Georges at university but our friendship was only born when we were working alongside Palestinians in the Fatah Party. He used to drive every day from his house in Sinn al-Fil to my house in Zuqaq al-Blat, and give me a ride to Shatila where we worked as hospital volunteers. This was when the crossings between the two Beiruts were still open. Later we met as lovers. We met then at Intisar and Malek's house and after that in an apartment that Georges rented for us in the Arab University area near the hospital.

I remember the day when we decided to move to a safer place. We were in Intisar's room and neither of them—that is to say, Intisar and Malek—were home. I was naked and Georges was kneeling, kissing every part of my body, his hand gently stroking my breasts. Suddenly we heard the door open. It was Intisar's sister, who lived with her, coming home from school. We used to remember that first time we met her and laugh about it together.

We ate dinner at the house of a Danish woman who also worked as a hospital volunteer in the Shatila camp. After dinner there once I took off my shoes and left them in the middle of the room near the leg of the dining table. At the end of the night, Georges had to drive me home because the wine had made my head heavy. I asked him to help me get to the car and don't remember what happened on the way. No doubt I fell asleep, since I do remember how he gently stroked my face and shoulders to wake me up, saying, “Myriam, Myriam, come on, we're there.” When I didn't answer, he asked jokingly, “Will you sleep at my place?” When I still didn't answer, he said, openly and naughtily, “Will you sleep with me?”

I woke up with all my faculties at that moment as though a bell had suddenly rung inside my head. When I got out of the car he slipped a piece of paper with his phone number on it into my hand, saying, “We've known each other for a while and we don't call each other. I won't call you first, even though I really want to see you again. I'll leave it to you to take the initiative.” I was sleepy but awake enough to hear him and like what he said. I liked how simply he said what he wanted.

The next time we met, he told me how my shoes had excited his imagination and a thousand poems that night! He said this laughingly, then stopped and added as though he were reading from a book, “Just seeing one of your shoes upside down turned my whole life upside down, from top to toe!” Rarely did we meet without recalling the memory of that evening. While kissing my body, he'd repeat, “I only had to see one of your shoes, left carelessly on the bare tiles near the table, to imagine you in bed, naked. This was enough to make me desire you, to be aroused and imagine your naked legs clenched around my waist while I'm on top of you.”

I started to believe that Georges couldn't have sex without recalling that story. He brought fruit into bed before making love, fed me grapes, kissed me and put his tongue in my mouth to share the fruit. Sometimes, when in bed, I felt we were playing, like children, and that our bodies were finding their way to a pleasure without sin.

Before I left for Australia, we made love early in the morning. This was the most pleasurable time for him.

Relaxed and contented, I whispered to him after we'd finished making love: “I forgive you all your past sins and those which you have not yet committed, from now until five hundred years into the future.”

He answered with a laugh, “Yes, yes, my Goddess, my Lord-ess.” I used my damp hand to wipe the juices of our lovemaking from between my legs, and told him, “This is the holy water, take it as a baptism.” I rubbed my hand on his face and forehead. I told him that rituals, no matter what religion you were raised in, are pure sex. For me, the best moments to make love are during prayer times, since there's so much Sufi ritual in lovemaking.

Georges found my comparison between making love and Sufism strange, and answered with a devilishness that I love, “There are too many holy prayers and rituals… one man alone cannot carry out all your wishes.” I said sarcastically, “Yes, there are more than you think, especially if you gather up all the sects in the world and add up all of their required prayers and rituals. For us here in Lebanon, my dear, this won't be easy—it's almost too many to calculate!”

“Luckily, your rituals can be completed without speaking aloud!” he replied, still laughing.

“You're evil and shameless!” I answered, throwing myself on top of him.

The war kidnapped Georges. His family is still waiting for him to come back. He's neither alive nor dead. He's between two places, suspended between war and peace, the past and the present. I remember the day we met in our apartment near the Arab University and I told him that the test I'd taken confirmed I was pregnant and that the doctor had advised me to have an abortion because I was still unmarried and was, as he put it, “a good girl, from a good family, not a slut.”

I wanted to shout in the doctor's face but instead I closed my eyes and waited for him to finish what he was saying. Then I removed his hand from my naked belly, got down off the examination table, put on my underwear, and hurried out. After I aborted the baby, I didn't see Georges much for a while. I was angry at him, at myself, at everything. But our separation didn't last long.

After the fall of Tell al-Zaatar, Georges didn't go back very often to the East Beirut neighborhood where he used to live. They knew his face there. He started to be afraid, though his fear didn't prevent his kidnappers from disappearing him. No one knows how he disappeared and when. People say many things… that he was kidnapped in West Beirut, more specifically near our apartment by the Arab University, that he was kidnapped off a boat headed from Beirut to Larnaca, or perhaps just minutes before he was to board the boat.

 

I have to leave Nour before five in the afternoon. Intisar is waiting for me at the Rawda café. I gently extract my body from his arms. At that moment, I feel like someone returning a stolen love to its rightful owners.

I leave to go meet Intisar and decide to walk between Ras al-Nabaa and Raouche, trying to find my way with considerable difficulty between the forest of cars parked on the sidewalk.

When I arrive at the Rawda café, Intisar is waiting for me there with Malek. I haven't seen them in fifteen years. How much Intisar's changed—her face seems rounder but paler and faded. Her body is thicker and slower moving, but the sparkle in her eyes and her nervous laughter remain a registered trademark of their owner. She hugs me with a shout, “Meemoo, my love!” She always called me that when we were at university. “My God, how much I've missed you!” she carries on, her voice as loud as an explosion. I feel the people around us becoming a big circle that encloses us. Intisar wanted to surprise me and has invited all of our old friends. Laughter and questions and kisses and tears. A hug then an abbreviated life story, still suspended powerfully in memory. Immediately after I left Beirut, I had exchanged letters with some of the people here today, but when I moved from Australia to Kenya our communications were cut off. So many of my friends, both men and women, whom I haven't seen for so long are all here together. I can't believe that Intisar gathered this many people to welcome me back. I feel as though I'm lost among them and don't know what to say. “The thing they remember the most are the love letters that we sent to that sociology professor at the university, my God, those days… we were happy despite the war,” Rima says while we're hugging each other and laughing. “We were naughty!” I tell her. Jokingly she asks me, “Are you still?”

We'd drawn pictures in red pen of hearts and kisses, addressed the envelope to the sociology professor, with his office number in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, and put it into the university's internal mail.

In the Rawda café I meet most of my friends, those friends, friends who have changed. Moments of silence pass between us and nothing can change this, except stories from the past, stories of a time we shared. I have to concentrate hard when they talk about politics, especially local politics. I concentrate so that I can follow the thread as they're talking to me. But I still don't understand everything.

Intisar says, “In this country you'll find different groups. There are people who talk about the war like it happened in another country. Like they've forgotten everything. The past has become a story you read about in a book. There are some who've forgotten how people stood on their balconies applauding for young militia men while they dragged an unarmed man along the ground because he happened to be from a different sect. Some man they kidnapped at a flying roadblock or a checkpoint. Of course they say that the war's over, but perhaps nothing is over. There's a place for everyone: for the person who wants to forget and the person who wants to remember. What's important is to know where you want to position yourself.” Intisar says all this while looking at my face, wide-eyed. It's as though she's pointing her finger at me, accusing me of committing a crime, though I don't know what. Maybe it's the crime of having a memory, especially the memory of those who left the country during the war. It's as if someone who emigrated has no right to remember—to remember violence, to remember the war. The war's not over, I say to myself, while Intisar continues, as though delivering a speech prepared in advance. Stories about the war go nowhere but backward; they return to the same place they started from and then sometimes flare up, taking on a more violent form.

History repeats itself. Is this because of the nature of the place? Is it because of the terraces that are peculiar to the land here? Our history comes like our land… cut off, broken, incomplete, re-making itself in repetitive rows. Is this because our cities die and can't find anyone to bury them? Why here, in this particular spot in the world, is violence reborn hundreds of times?

Here, in the midst of friends, conversations, shouting, then silence, I imagine that I'm playing out my losses. This is all I have in Beirut.

Rima, who's getting ready to open a restaurant downtown, starts talking to Intisar, saying that the war's over. I pay little attention. Words derive their credibility from the person who utters them; they have no power outside this. They become merely voices, like wind echoing in the forest. A relative of Rima's who's come back from the Gulf rented a recently renovated old building in order to open a chain of restaurants and has put Rima in charge of managing one of them. Wonderful! Intisar pronounces.

Everything happens here as though life is normal, though there are still roadblocks and checkpoints in many places. People in Beirut do whatever they please, but in order to stomach this, they eat nostalgia with a fork and knife and then broadcast the leftovers through the media. Old Beirut is transforming into rubble with skyscrapers on top of it, with restaurants, amusement parks and religious buildings. Wafaa bends toward me as though she wants to share some kind of secret, saying that she—like me—doesn't understand what's going on. “I keep trying to understand what's going on, and it's torture,” she says.

“Checkpoints are still all over the place, nothing's right. It still isn't calm but—they say the war's over! I don't understand, that's why I'm doing yoga,” Wafaa says, bitterly sarcastic. When I say I'd like to try a yoga class with her, we arrange to go together in the coming week.

“Don't try to understand, concentrate on your yoga lessons, dear, that's better!” Unfortunately, Intisar has overheard her and chimes in passive-aggressively. She goes on, “You too?! As if it's not bad enough with Myriam! But Myriam's been out of the country… You, what's your excuse for not understanding? You can't link two things together… roadblocks and sandbags are still there… what does this mean? Do you want to say that things haven't calmed down yet, but the war's over? OK. Just accept that this is what happens here: the war stops, tourists come back, and the sandbags are still there at the checkpoints!”

Intisar raises her voice, then calms back down, “Maybe it's better to see every event independently from the one before it. One event has nothing to do with the next. Then we can deal better with what's happening. It's easier, less painful.”

“Yellah, my wife's scene is over,” Malek says theatrically, announcing the end of Intisar's speech. “Yes, the scene's over, but I haven't finished yet!” Intisar answers, directing her statement at me. Despite their differences, when Intisar speaks she reminds me of Seetajeet, my psychotherapist in Mombasa. Maybe because they're similar in their confidence that what they're saying is the absolute truth: a truth which, for me, is never stable or at all self-evident.

The war's stopped and there are still piles of sandbags. I must accept this; I must stop trying to understand. I'll learn how, I tell myself. There's no doubt that it would be very hard to follow the progression of events from the outside, from far away, seeing each event as independent and having no past, no relationship to what came before. But it's not impossible. It's inconsistent with the concept of history, but it's good to try, even if only once in my whole life! “We don't have choices here. We only have one thing, that's it, forgetting!” Wafaa says as I put out my last cigarette in the already full ashtray.

But what about those people who fought the war… who killed and kidnapped and mutilated bodies… Where are they? And where are their victims?

The waiter comes with a pot of tea and plates filled with manaqeesh, labneh and vegetables. Instisar calls out to him to come back and asks for “country-style” olive oil, as she calls it. “Country-style olive oil, please, from the Koura… Yes!” Then she turns to me saying, “The difference between you and us dear is that we lived devastation daily. It's over … we've gotten used to it. Soon you'll get used to everything, believe me.” She says this while cutting pieces from the big tomato and distributing them to everyone seated around the table. Then she turns toward Wafaa and asks her about her husband's health, because she'd hinted at a setback he suffered after emergency heart surgery.