Beirut Blues (11 page)

My friend Muna was with me, impatient for my news, or rather for news of Beirut and the siege. She had left Lebanon for Cairo at the outbreak of war, and felt guilty, but I didn’t want to stir up emotions, and felt like a traitor myself for escaping.

I thought the ships would stop the minute they saw us, but Muna ran towards them and her daughter chased after her crying. She plunged into the water and waded forward until it reached her waist, her daughter still trying to follow her, both of them waving and shouting, but the ships slowly
disappeared from view, although some people on deck waved at us. Muna’s daughter was wailing, “Pick me up. I want to see the fedayeen.”

The ships disappeared like passing clouds, leaving me with an image of hands raised in victory salutes. I didn’t believe that ships could go by so fast. Aircraft are visible for longer and you still hear them when they’re out of sight and see the white vapor trails. The ships seemed to surface for a moment like submarines, then plunge back down to the comfort of the seabed.

We waited impatiently for other ships. The sun had moved off our faces and off the cold drinks for sale on the beach. I began to be afraid that we might be waiting in vain, and a tiny part of me hoped we were, in case it hurt your pride if I saw you standing dejectedly on deck or rolling your sleeves up to prepare your grilled fish. I longed for all the commotion to stop, the pop and fizz of bottles being opened and the mothers shouting in fear and annoyance each time their children went near the water.

The sun was almost submerged in the sea and the Egyptian officer came up to assure me there would certainly be other ships passing, no doubt remembering the horror on my face the previous day when they had vanished in a flash.

The ship appeared. It was coming closer, dropping anchor, or was I mistaken? The officer pulled me by the hand and I caught hold of Muna and her daughter. Others followed us to a small boat which ferried us out to the ship. All the botded-up waiting seemed to breathe out again in that little rowboat. I thought of what I would say to you when I saw you; the conversation I had worked out before, the way I
had imagined us looking at each other, had vanished into thin air. It wasn’t until I was on board the ship that I knew I had been deluding myself. You must have been on one of the other ships, or else still in Beirut. Muna was weeping bitterly as she embraced the fedayeen, and this made her daughter cry. The young men and women fighters tried to calm her down. The older men, their faces creased with fatigue and hopelessness, succeeded in quieting all those who were weeping. A young woman with deep brown skin and eyes full of life and mischief came up. “Put my mind at rest!” she said. “Is it true that in Sudan and Yemen the sun is scorching? I’m scared I’ll go even darker than I am already.”

“Don’t worry,” said my friend reassuringly. “A month, and you’ll be back.”

The wounded men lay on deck wrapped in civilian clothes and kaffiyehs over their battle fatigues, shivering with cold. They asked the Egyptian officer for blankets and he promised to do what he could, but did not move from where he stood. I thought I could hear Greek music, Greek voices. It was a Greek merchant ship; as far as the crew were concerned, they were just carrying a different cargo from usual. That fact shook me more than the dried blood on the deck. Isolated by having the sea as their constant companion, these sailors appeared to look harshly on everything connected with dry land. Voices called, “One dollar. Two dollars. Coffee, tea, sandwiches.”

I was astonished when the youths reached into the pockets of their combat gear and brought out dollars. Some stared out to sea and the others gathered around us giving us kaffiyehs and flags, live bullets and some letters to mail.

I realized I was no longer thinking about you, forgetting you in the chaos, aware only of the ship’s decaying timbers and the voices of those around us. I clutched the letters, promising to mail them the same day. Muna and I were trying to catch the little girl who had begun to wail loudly, refusing to leave the ship, when I heard a voice calling me. “Asma, Asma.”

It was Rana, your friend’s daughter, in black shorts. She pulled me to her, embracing me and asking if I was going with them. She looked around for you and asked me about you. I recalled her room where you had stayed for a few days and how I had refused to lie down on her bed, and remembered her whispering to me one night, when you called me into the room claiming you had something to give me, “Perhaps he’s going to kiss you.”

My Dear Land,

We’re setting out for you, but we still haven’t reached you. I can picture you lying under the sun and rain; you are the only thing lost in the war which is still physically present.

I haven’t visited you since you were occupied, since your trees were cut down, and they changed your features. How hard I tried to make my grandfather leave you! But he preferred to expose himself to kidnapping, even to death, in order to stay close to you. How can someone be so attached to the inanimate? But I suppose you’re alive: you bear fruit, grow thirsty and cold; you’re changeable and not always compliant, for with your great open spaces or a small handful of your soil you’ve modified and shaped humanity; you’ve produced my family and been privy to the minutest secrets of their souls. You whispered my family’s name and the echo
picked it up and went shouting among the mountains and valleys, across the plains and around the telegraph poles, until it reached Beirut; you stayed where you were, but kept close to us even in Beirut.

I expect to feel pain at the sight of you and the unbelievable changes in you; what I see now as we drive past ruined buildings resembles fragments of crossword puzzles, made out of cement and wood and gaps where the sky shows through, or which people have filled in with plastic bags. Nevertheless, a secret feeling of happiness creeps over me as I catch a glimpse of a tree and picture a bird singing in its branches or flying off into the lovely wide-open sky, and feel convinced that there are still colors and life in the world. The driver stops in one of the lines at a checkpoint and I hear him say to the car drawn up next to him, “I’ve got some jars of honey here for the father of a friend of mine, from his son in England.”

This normality, even though it gives a skewed picture, brings peace to my heart, making Beirut seem far away. These days the city is awash with colored plastic water containers; the word “dollar” dominates the conversation, drowning out the sound of the generators; money changers follow the price of the dollar, headsets clamped to their ears; Fadila mistook these for Walkmans. “Is that a new model?” she asked one of them. “How much did it cost you?” They even have mobile premises these days: a plastic bag which they carry around with them. People have grown accustomed to seeing the dollar and the picture of George Washington, instead of the blue of the Lebanese hundred-lira note.
Even the Gypsy who sells thyme and chicory asked Zemzem to pay for her purchases in dollars. “Why not? Just for you! In dollars it is!” Zemzem replied spitefully.

She left her sitting on the staircase, her sack in her lap, and came back with a bundle of newspaper clippings. When the Gypsy objected, Zemzem laughed. “I bet you’ve never seen a dollar in your life,” she said.

Beirut is far away now, like a blazing ember which we dare not approach even in our thoughts, for fear of being burned, but the echo of exploding shells persists inside our heads. We get out of the car by a flourishing orchard to rest from the potholes and the roadblocks, which show no sign of diminishing in frequency as the journey progresses. There are still many hours to go to our village and the driver suggests lunch and begins lighting a fire and taking potatoes, eggs, and chicken from a bag. “Ali’s orders,” he declares.

My grandmother objects, muttering that we aren’t hungry. “I am,” cries Zemzem. “So’s the driver. We all need to eat.”

Many other people had already stopped their cars and were scattered in groups around the orchard, some lying on the grass, others chasing after their children. The smell of roasting meat crept into my nostrils and I suddenly felt hungry, and flung myself down on the grass like them. At once my grandmother asked me not to, explaining that I was different from them.

I sat up, clasping my legs and resting my head on my knees, and my grandmother reprimanded me again. I wandered over to watch the driver, who was still fanning the fire with a newspaper. A group of boys had gathered around
him, including one who had lost his hand. He seemed quite lively, even though he still had spots of blood on his shirt. I must have been staring at him, as a woman came up to me and said, “The bastards he worked for did it.” Before I could think what to say, she went on, “He went to work as usual, reached out to pick up a shoe, and there was an explosion which blew his hand off.”

Could he really be a garbage collector? He looked about ten.

“Why? What does he do?”

Her face lit up at the prospect of someone who would take an interest in her troubles. “He goes to the dump and sorts everything into separate bags. Sorry, it’s a bit disgusting. Glass, plastic, empty cans. It’s better than being scared out of his mind, which he would be if he went to look for gold teeth in the graveyard at night, like some of them do.”

I felt embarrassed at my failure to grasp all the implications of what she was saying. “What does he do with the things he collects?” I asked her.

She stared, and looked me up and down, becoming convinced in the process that she couldn’t form an opinion about my material status on the basis of my clothes. “He takes it to the scrap dealers.”

I replied quickly, as if wanting to exonerate his employers, that it wasn’t in their interests to blow his hand off.

She did not challenge me immediately and say, “Why not? Where have you been?” She just looked me up and down again and nodded her head, assuring herself of my naïveté or the truth of her words: “Why not? Everybody knows about it. When respectable men and women start
looking through the rubbish, the dealers get annoyed, as if it was specially reserved for their own people. God will see justice done. Big tough men are losing their dignity. Never mind. We’re going to ask al-Hariri and they’ll make him a new hand.”

She fidgeted a little and looked down at the ground, then asked me where we were going and whether the driver was my brother or my cousin, and if Zemzem was my mother. Then, pointing to the big truck, she said, “Our neighbor took pity on us. I wanted to go and see my mother and he gave us a lift.”

Why did I not believe the stories Zemzem told, and yet I believed this woman? Was it because there was always a ring of grim satisfaction to what Zemzem said, a tearful note, a hint of exaggeration? Whenever she told us tales like these, I found myself saying it was the victims’ fault or a feeling of indifference towards them, and I noticed my grandmother did the same. Had Zemzem not told us about explosions in the rubbish dumps which had taken people’s fingers off and we had dismissed the subject, saying these were just rumors designed to spread fear and chaos, so that people like her would get scared?

“Somebody’s mother sold her wedding ring so that she could make bread salad and meat loaf. Somebody else bought a wedding dress for her daughter off the family of a bride-to-be who’d died before her wedding day. Zakiyya took her son away from school because he wasn’t very bright, so that she could afford to send the rest.”

It was true every household was feeling the effects of inflation, even ours. My grandmother decided that it would
not make us live any longer if we ate
qashqawan
cheese, so she stopped buying it. Zemzem roasted one chicken at a time instead of two, and white-collar workers and people with average incomes started doing without basics. Our next-door neighbor no longer brought a pot of coffee around in the afternoons when she came to hear our news; instead she would bring mulberry juice from her village.

We go back to the car and drive off, only to be pulled up at another checkpoint. I’ve become familiar with the variations and am learning how to deal with them. A show of seriousness is required if they are manned by the militias; pleading or looking frightened doesn’t work; it is best to be patient with the Syrians, as their soldiers seem tired, and fed up with being away from home. In the past I had overreacted at checkpoints: they seemed to open my eyes to the plain truth that Lebanon had been divided into statelets and zones, that there were people working to specific agendas and that the present situation had not been anticipated in advance by the fighters.

We stop. “We’ll have to go back. We’ll take the upper road: the low road is full of bandits. Mr. Ali’s orders.”

“What’s the world coming to?” sighs my grandmother.

I understand what she means: Ali has become Mr. Ali. The low road is nearer, easier, but the trees grow so thickly on either side of it that it is overrun with ordinary robbers posing as militiamen, and holding up cars on the pretext of checking drivers’ ID cards. If only the driver would take a risk and go by the low road so that I could see its trees in all their abundance, have a look at the bandits, and relish the sight of Zemzem fearing for her quail.

Some of the villages were razed to the ground and looked like historical remains or part of the natural scenery, but I was pleased to see washing spread out to dry and smell smoke rising from a valley where they were burning rubbish and dead leaves; I was even glad to hear a donkey braying: it all reminded me of the past and you. But the roadblocks reminded me of the present, and my fears for you.

We used to visit the village from time to time in the early years of the war. As the country grew more rocky and mountainous, the vines would appear, and the orchards full of gladioli like yellow and white lollipops; the village seemed untouched by the fighting, and the sound of rockets and mortars there was unimaginable, but some buildings had obviously been hit. In peacetime we left the sea, drove over the mountains, and plunged downwards onto the plains until we reached the outskirts of the village. I used to wonder why it was there in that particular spot. The blind shepherd was always the first to hear my grandmother’s car and recognize the sound of its engine; he would hurry towards it, feeling his way over the stones with his stick, and as soon as he came to the asphalt, he would shout at his flock to wait. Ali stopped the car and dismounted to fetch him and lead him up to the window, restraining him from hitting it so vigorously with his stick. When the shepherd heard my grandmother’s voice, he kissed his palm and put it to his forehead in a gesture of gratitude. She opened her black handbag and took out a bundle of lira notes, folded them in two, and placed them in his hand. When she closed the bag again, it always made a loud, self-important click.