Beirut Blues (17 page)

“I love you to death, my family

Pray God to grant you success.

But why did I forsake the ABC

Just because of you

My joints seize up whenever I remember

How you did me wrong

And all I have to say to you is

May God forgive you.”

Ruhiyya didn’t give up hope even when he finished his studies, graduated, and was engaged and then married to a Beirut girl. She danced at his wedding to the song “Beat the Tambourines, Good People, Come,” and in her head she
changed the words to “Beat my head with stones, good people, come.”

All the same, she never stopped thinking up verses and songs, and when she recited them, she felt close to him and her sorrow increased, but afterwards it abated. She did not return to the village until he took up a highly paid post abroad and traveled away. For the first few months she talked about Beirut as if she knew it like the back of her hand, dressed smartly and wore high-heeled shoes, which got holes in them when she walked on the stony ground. The first thing she always looked for in the newspaper, which she still bought from time to time when she went down to the village square, was news of the country where her cousin was. She refused all the men who asked her to marry them. Most were schoolteachers in neighboring villages and one was a man from Beirut whom she had already met while she was living with her aunt. But she wanted someone like her cousin, or at least someone with the same kind of job. After a while people stopped asking her. Her voice took on a huskier note and she sang folk songs and laments, rolled cigarettes, coughed and hawked up phlegm like a man, didn’t care what people around her thought, and laughed and joked with people much younger than her. In particular there was her younger cousin Jawad, who discovered when he was an adolescent that his cousin Ruhiyya, who used to dress him in his school uniform and buckle his shoes for him, had made a lasting impression on him. He began coming to visit her in summer vacations and hanging around in her house with his friends.

So her house swarmed with adolescents who were fascinated
by her. She joked with them, criticized them, advised them, and sometimes found herself caressing their hair and singing to them.

A firefly kept me company one night

I thanked the Lord for sending it

Even though it was bite-size

At least it lit the darkness

But when I got thirsty

And had a drink

Tarzan the firefly swung down

And leapt into my mouth.

Ruhiyya opens the wooden door into the garden and the light floods in, revealing her furniture, looking the same as ever. I follow her over the doorstep down into the hanging gardens, as she calls it, or alternatively “my little patch of earth,” in the middle of which is a single pomegranate tree with fruit growing right to the tips of its branches.

“Food from God, Asma. You sit on the step and I’ll peel some for you.”

She laughed and reached out her hand and rested it on my knee. “What’s going on, princess?”

I answered like a polite schoolgirl. “Nothing. Everything’s fine.”

“Come on! You can’t tell me you’re looking so nice for nothing!”

Thoughts of Simon, the press photographer, even of Ricardo, went through my mind. I shrugged my shoulders. “Everyone asks but you. Marriage and all that stuff. But who
wants to fall in love or get married? I work only one day in ten. So I oil my hair, wash it in chamomile, put zucchini ends on my face, coconut milk in the bath. That’s all.”

She laughed. “I know you’re waiting for my cousin Jawad. Why don’t you go and visit him abroad? When he sees you he’ll go wild. I swear my name’s not Ruhiyya if I don’t get you two together.”

I felt embarrassed. I knew how Ruhiyya’s mind worked, and she was looking at my breasts.

We heard Juhayna shouting from the street. “What’s this? Danger? No entry?”

We laughed at the way she expressed herself. Ruhiyya hurried delightedly to unlock the door. “It’s all right. It’s someone perfectly respectable.”

Juhayna came in full of confidence, laughing too. “Of course it is. I came back for Asma’s sake. Come on, I want to take her for a walk. To show her the hairdresser’s and the café. She asked me about them this morning. Didn’t you, Asma?”

Having left the hilly parts of the village behind us, we walked along down on the plain, the hot air striking us in the face. I liked the feel of it and wished we could have a long spell of hot dry weather. In place of the winding arid streets were villas, apartment houses, and big cars standing out in the sun. All that in the space of two years? The café-restaurant had a neon sign which probably flashed on and off at night. A delicious smell of grilled meat floated up our noses. Smoke drifted over the tables and chairs and hovered above a line of washing which was visible in one corner despite
efforts to hide it with an arrangement of dried grasses and straw. I suggested to Juhayna that we should have lunch there. She hesitated, then said that most of the customers at this time of day were men; the girls came later on in the afternoon. We went on around the café towards the door and saw Samira grilling meat over the stove. She rushed to kiss us both, and urged us to eat with her in her house. When Juhayna indicated that I wanted to sit in the restaurant, Samira shook her head dismissively. “I couldn’t possibly let you,” she said.

I tried to convince her that I had difficulty believing there was really a restaurant in the village at all and was curious to eat there to prove it to myself. She seemed to be the only person in the whole place apart from us, then we heard the sound of a car pulling up. “I hope that’s my husband,” she said. “I could do with some help.”

But it was an enormous black Cadillac and Juhayna rushed out calling to the driver to give us a lift. Samira waved the smoke away from her face, smiling, and said Juhayna had been a good girl and taken care of my grandfather while we were away. “You came back yesterday, didn’t you? I really must go and say hello to your grandmother.”

Juhayna rushed back in. “Come on. Shauqi’s going to give us a lift home.”

Samira didn’t object; apparently she’d forgotten inviting us to eat, and I fancied a ride in this monstrosity of a car. I could hardly believe that girls had become bold enough to take lifts with men. When I was in my teens, ours had been the only private car around here, and then the family without
a name had bought one. I stopped myself thinking like this; it brought it home to me that I’d truly left the village behind and become thoroughly immersed in life in Beirut.

Shauqi opened the door for us, and I followed Juhayna into the car. I said hello to the round face brimming with sweaty well-being. The chaos which prevailed in the luxurious interior did not surprise me—plastic cartons, cigarette packs, a kaffiyeh—but the high-quality paintbrushes attracted my attention. I asked who the artist was, certain it couldn’t be the driver. Juhayna seized the packet of brushes and opened it. “God, does the martyrs’ painter really use a brush like this?”

“Why? Do you expect him to use a broom?” Shauqi retorted.

I laughed loudly. Pleased at my response, he repeated the joke. “What does she expect me to say? Do people normally paint with brooms?”

His square, solid head shook with laughter.

“Yes. Painter to the martyrs. He gets down and does these paintings as if he’s working the land. He goes from village to village. Comes back with these photos and starts painting any old how. He finally got lucky. He was never any good at anything. And now his paintings are hanging in every house.”

It was his brother Abdullah who was the artist. He got to know the fighters in Hizbullah and Amal before they died, and painted them after their death. I expressed a desire to see these paintings, and Shauqi said I was more than welcome.

“Now? In the heat of the day?” gasped Juhayna.

“It’s not as if you’ll be outside,” he retorted. “We have air-conditioned rooms these days.”

Then he inquired after my grandparents’ health. “God give the old man strength,” he added, making me tremble with rage. As if they were ill or frail! Suddenly I pictured them through the eyes of the villagers who used to come to the house to ask after their health or discuss work in the orchards, and then sit tongue-tied in their presence.

This luxurious car and the gold key ring must make him think he was superior to me. But my anger vanished when I saw the “air-conditioned rooms,” whose furniture still amounted to no more than a few mattresses and cushions around the walls. His mother was very welcoming, and couldn’t believe it was really Asmahan getting out of her son’s car and coming into her house so informally. She went into the other room and I heard her swearing by Imam Ali that I was here in their house. Three women and a man crowded into the room. I was shocked by the man’s appearance as he came up and shook my hand. I remembered him as the youth we used to call the elephant man. “You’re the most famous person in these parts,” teased Juhayna. “People are coming from Beirut to see you. Asmahan only arrived yesterday and she’s come rushing to look at your paintings, you sexy thing.”

I was annoyed by Juhayna’s loud voice, and the way she tried to act as if she were in charge of me, but I acquiesced.

“Just for you, then,” replied the artist.

If I hadn’t been used to his facial tics and twitches, I would have thought he was making fun of us.

His mother shouted that he should bring the martyrs into the living room rather than taking me to that garbage dump.

The artist replied defensively that artists’ studios were always in a state of chaos and I should know that. He spoke with a pronounced stammer. I stood up encouragingly. “If we may?”

“It’s the ladies that gi-gi-gi—”

“Give the orders,” his mother finished for him as he led us into his studio.

We heard a loud noise coming from the room where the baking oven was. Juhayna stopped at the door. “You’re working hard! Abdullah’s going to show us the martyrs.”

“I hope you don’t have my nephew’s photo there, Abdullah!” a voice called.

“Yes, here it is,” he answered derisively. “In my pocket. What do you think I am? The Angel of Death, come to snatch away s-s-s-souls?”

I stood in the middle of the room, not believing what I was seeing around me. Was it his bad eyesight—he wore two pairs of glasses like compresses over his eyes—or did the paralysis in his left hand affect his right, or was it his mouth being down on one side that made the words falter between his thoughts and his tongue and interfered with the discourse of his paintings too? His mouth remained open as if he might be going to say something else. He separated the paintings from one another, spreading them out before us in this rubbish dump—I thought his mother’s description was fairly accurate: there was a plate with the remains of a meal on it which looked as if it had been there for a year. Were these faces or incoherent scribblings? Had a can of tomatoes been
spilled and turned rotten in the hot air, or was this an attempt at color? Did these lines end somewhere outside the painting because he hadn’t seen the edges of the canvas? Was this a man’s eye, or woodworm?

Paint was Abdullah’s release in this war, and why not? He was like the people who had never picked up a pen in their lives except to note down their expenses, and then began pouring out their sorrow and anger onto paper as if they wanted to hold a conversation from the grave. Abdullah interpreted my lifeless response as follows: “Nobody sees these paintings without being st-st-stunned.”

Juhayna had disappeared. I heard her voice coming from the room where the oven was.

“Everyone says, ‘If only I could die a martyr so that you’d paint me.’ Before the lads go out on missions they come knocking on my door. I know, but what can I do? I have to control my emotions and with a couple of strokes I get the face. Then I put the canvas aside, and whoever’s martyred first I go back to his portrait and start filling in the details.”

I asked him if they saw the rough drafts before they died.

“Of course. There was one who told me his mustache should be bigger. He took the painting home and had his photo taken alongside it the day before he was killed! Now anyone who wants to know if his son’s in the party comes and asks me if I’ve got a photograph of him. As if I was Sherlock Holmes!”

I stopped examining the paintings and turned away, pretending to look for Juhayna. The place was swarming with midges, making it even more like a garbage heap. I caught up
with Juhayna at the back door where Abdullah’s mother and another woman were boiling quinces. The second woman, whom I couldn’t identify, had her hand up to her face because of the steam rising from the pot and was muffled in a white head scarf, but her voice was clear enough: “Well, Asmahan, did you see those madmen’s pictures? See how stupid they are. They’re the death of their families. Their mothers put up with all the pain of giving birth to them, sweep up cowshit for their sakes, and raise them. The fathers die a thousand deaths to keep their mouths stuffed with food, and go out begging to make sure they have an education. As soon as they’re old enough, they say, ‘Bye bye. We’re off now.’ ”

Juhayna picked up the song. “Bye bye. It’s time for us to go. Forgive us for what we put you through.”

“You’ve got a lovely voice, you bad girl,” interrupted one of the women.

“That’s enough of your st-st-stories,” shouted the artist.

As we stood there, we heard someone calling in the distance, “Juhayna!” Then laughter, then “Hey, gorgeous! Come and see us.”

Some girls in brightly colored dresses were standing in the yard of a building up on a nearby hill. “Who’s that with you, gorgeous?” they asked.

Their manner worked like a charm on Juhayna. She began to laugh. “Eat your hearts out!” she shouted back.