Beirut Blues (24 page)

“I’ll make some tea.”

I take out the tea tray with a new feeling of confidence. I avoid looking at you and don’t pay you the slightest attention. I sit listening to the water in the tank and look at the piles of sacks, the trucks, the distant winding roads. I visualize what is happening in Beirut and look for distractions, forcing myself to feel anxious about Ricardo, wondering what he’s going through. You are discussing the occupation of our land, inflation, the political parties. You ask my opinion a few times, but sensing my coldness, you switch your attention back to my grandfather, asking him for the story of the land in detail, listening with total absorption and hauling in the catch you’d trawled for in the vast seas of boredom and vanity.

As I walk with you later towards the painter’s house, I find it’s like walking on mounds of human flesh, so soft that I almost fall over. You have undermined my self-confidence from the moment you stood in Ruhiyya’s kitchen rubbing your eyes and yawning. It’s because of my sense of failure, of not having fulfilled myself, but how were you to know about
that? Now I find I am trying not to breathe audibly, even though people always do when they walk at any speed along these uneven roads. The village is humming like a city: girls walking alone and in groups, fighters in jeeps or on scooters watching the girls, or chatting and laughing together.

I am amazed you still talk in a village accent. Your city accent seems artificial, like Zemzem’s when she makes a big effort to adapt to Beirut. I wonder what is happening to me; it is as if I have never walked around with a man before, and I take in the road and the passersby at a purely mechanical level, while the awkward progress of my feet mirrors my words and thoughts.

Why did I come with you when it makes me feel so annoyed?

We are approaching the road leading off to the girls’ house on the hill where the drug laboratory is: I wish I could see the blond foreigner so that we could exchange glances. Then the artist’s shirt comes into view hanging on a clothesline strung between two trees. The magnificent black car is gone from the entrance where it is normally parked.

As soon as they catch sight of me they come out to welcome me, which makes me feel more confident, but as I begin to ask the painter’s mother if her son’s at home, she lets out a gasp of recognition. You receive much more of a welcome than I did, even the first time I went there. All the sweets and nuts which have been kept well hidden on my past visits are placed before us, or rather before you.

The painter isn’t at home. “I’ll send someone to find him for you,” cries his mother.

You’re impressed because they would never do that in France.

You don’t realize that they don’t even do it in Beirut nowadays. But you’re an important personality to them.

When they ask you what it is like in France, I can’t tell if the sentiments you express are genuine or not. For the first time in ages I feel acutely aware that I belong to the family which owns this land, and used to invade the cracks in the walls and the pores of their bodies uninvited, and provided them with oxygen or shut it off at will. I see myself alone now. They have forgotten who I am and have me where they want me. I sit with them as if sharing their admiration for you.

This feeling annoys me. It reminds me of my grandmother and is painful, even though I’ve always criticized her for it in the past. She told me off for accepting a lift in the brother’s car; he has turned up now and is pumping your hand as if he’ll never let it go.

“Do you know how many hens and cows that family used to have?” she’d asked me scornfully. “They’re nobody.”

I felt like saying that those days had gone forever, and the women who came to visit her now were visiting the past, perhaps because the memory made them happy in comparison with how they felt about the present; she had become a temporary consolation, like a visit to a graveyard when you’re depressed. But she was one of them now, completely powerless.

I look at their faces again, unable to believe that my
family is dead and buried as far as they are concerned. I feel like reminding them of our existence, but I stop myself and sit there with a smile of gloomy satisfaction on my face, comforting myself with images and scenes from the past. I remember these young men as children tagging along in the wake of the noisy celebrations my family organized for religious feasts or election victories. A big space was cleared outside to serve as the dining area. Around dawn the sheep could be heard uttering their last cries in the distance before they were slaughtered and I would rush to see the men skinning them. All hands and eyes were on the woolly fleeces, even though it was my grandmother who would have the final word on what happened to them.

The women from the village would position themselves around the eating area lighting braziers, pumping Primus stoves, grilling meat, chasing away the cats, dogs, flies, and children. So it would go on for hours until they collected all the hot stoves, whose flames fluttered wearily and went out, then extinguished the braziers by pouring water on them so that they made a whispering sound:
wish-wish.
Then all the cooking pots were lined up in the yard by the kitchen, waiting for Naima and Zemzem to spoon out the rice and arrange it on the wicker trays, smoothing it flat with their hands, pinching a mouthful every now and then.

When all the trays looked like pools of salt or brilliant white patches of snow, it was my grandmother’s turn. She approached in her finery, raising her eyes to the sky and saying a quick prayer, then rolled up one long sleeve of her dress, anchoring it above her elbow and exposing her beautiful white wrist. She bent down, closing her eyes and saying a
blessing, and began reaching into the pots, braving the heat. Lifting out the pieces of meat as if they were made of glass, she arranged them carefully on top of the rice, having second thoughts when she’d all but finished and moving a piece from one tray to another.

While she was doing this the buses had begun to arrive, decked with banners bearing the names of their villages. The female passengers moved straight up to the house and gathered near the kitchen yard, squatting over the trays of food there, while the men streamed out behind the house and threw themselves on the other trays spread out there and did not get up until there was nothing left. At this point the victorious candidate arrived and made a speech which went on until a man on horseback waved a flag and blew a horn; this was a sign for the men and women to assemble ready to depart so that the passengers of other buses from other villages could take their places and celebrate the candidate’s win. The newcomers were preceded by a small band, and the trays of food were replenished.

The horn blew and the flag waved, and instead of the winning candidate, they raised my grandfather up on their shoulders. He tried to struggle free, but I’m sure he was secretly delighted every time they hoisted him high in the air.

In the evening he went over the day’s events with my grandmother, criticizing the winning candidate, and they made fun of the self-conscious way he walked and his pompous speech; on my grandfather’s instructions Abu Mustafa had brought a wooden stool for the candidate to stand on so that he would be visible above the crowd. His father and
mother had been there to watch, convinced their son was an important personality, and his mother had bent and kissed my grandmother’s hand.

Suddenly the painter comes through the door like a hurricane. He shakes your hand, squeezing it tightly, and greets me: “H-h-hello, madam.”

He comes back with the paintings. I look at the floor, afraid I will laugh at your solemn remarks. The painter is trying to articulate the sentence on the tip of his tongue as he confronts the paintings, which are even cruder than the lids of chocolate boxes. “In France don’t they have e-e-e-exhibitions of the art produced by the struggle, or Is-Is-Islamic art?”

You nod your head soothingly. “They might. There’s no reason why they shouldn’t.”

Then his brother says, “We’ll let you loose on the world, you scoundrel! Soon they’ll be giving you an exhibition at the Eiffel Tower!”

The painter laughs delightedly and I shudder with annoyance at his delusions and your dishonesty.

On the way back I am torn by conflicting emotions, longing to be close to you and to shout at you in almost equal measure. It is nearly dusk and the setting sun bathes the fields around us. White and red poppies, growing alongside beans and heavily laden tomato plants, stand motionless in the still air. There are patches of sand here and there. Dogs bark as they form packs to roam the streets. Wires carrying stolen electricity trail from the telegraph poles. I inhale the smoke of thistles burning on an old bonfire and the
smell tickles my senses. I ridicule the painter for wanting his work to be shown abroad.

“I really admire him. He ignores what’s going on around him, the drugs, the spin-offs, and just keeps painting martyrs.”

“D-drugs. S-spin-offs. God help anyone who t-t-tries to do secret deals with him,” I say, finding myself imitating the painter’s stammer.

You burst out laughing, so I think I must have done it well.

The smell of you begins to reach me, even though we are out in the open, and again I feel a warmth because I am near you and we are walking together over this land. We are both strangers to it and this brings us together just a little, even though our worlds are far apart. I point to the hairdresser’s sign where ‘Cleopatra’ is misspelled in French. “That’s sweet,” you say.

You seem unwilling to talk as you look at the sky, the speeding cars, the plains on either side of the road, and confine yourself to exhaling deeply as if you are smoking. I think sadly how a person ends up existing for himself, however hard he tries to be close to others or give himself to them. But your sighs grow more frequent and finally he stops and seizes my hand and says almost in a whisper, “Look what they’re doing to these plains. See how everything’s calm and still on the surface, but underneath it’s seething with intrigues, drugs, and party politics.”

You carry on and I listen, but remain unmoved by your lecture about drugs and corruption. You’ve arrived late with
your theories. There’s nothing wrong with a little enthusiasm here and there, because you will soon forget and leave our reality behind for the European way of life. Your diary is crowded with appointments—publishers, magazines, dinner invitations, parties, broadcasts—all of them written in your neat, clear hand. You prescribe laws as if you were in a normal country with citizens who still glory in that title and all it stands for. It’s easy for you to propound these views, when you haven’t hidden in a shelter, had friends and neighbors killed in bread lines, returned home to your apartment building and found it has vanished, and realized after a moment that the rubble under your feet is all that remains of it.

I must hurry home: I can feel this person beside me writing a novel as he walks along and it looks as if I’ll have to provide the warmth I need tonight for myself. I’ll go home and listen to Billie Holiday.

My grandfather is on the porch eating his evening meal. Suma stands at his side waiting for him to signal if he needs anything. When he sees who’s with me, his face brightens and he waves you to eat with him.

He calls Zemzem, and to my astonishment Juhayna follows her out. Again I compare her mentally to a cat who knows there is no longer any food for her here, but still yearns for the smell. Even more surprising, you greet her: “Well, Juhayna! You’ve moved up in the world! Where did you spring from, my lovely?”

I realize you must have met her at Ruhiyya’s. My grandfather scolds her for disappearing and avoiding him even when she was still under his roof. Then he slurps his milk down noisily, spilling it on his mustache and chin.

Juhayna hurls herself at me and flings her arms around me, kissing me, and I try to wriggle free. She grabs hold of my hair, exclaiming, “Look at this! It’s the first time I’ve seen you with your hair curled.”

I go into the kitchen and spoon some food onto a plate for you, eager to look at myself in the mirror in the passage. When I take the food out and put it in front of you. I can see that Juhayna is entranced by you, and realize why her desire to have her revenge even on the earth and air surrounding us has diminished. The day after she found out that I had hired Suma through a domestic agency in the nearby town, she sent a message threatening that her sister’s Iranian fiancé was going to intervene on her behalf.

I’ve never seen her as she is tonight, laughing loudly, not remotely resembling the creature who was making our lives a misery only days before. I gesture with my head, indicating that she should follow me inside, suppressing a desire to remind her of her position by calling out to her in front of everyone that I must pay her the money still owing to her. She doesn’t make it any easier when she comes up and puts her arms around me and inquires of the assembled company, “Don’t you think me and Asma are like sisters?”

My grandfather gets to his feet and comes over and takes hold of Juhayna by the hair, pulling her playfully towards him. “Come on, can’t we be friends?”

“Leave me alone. I mean it. My grandfather’s younger than you. That means you’re the same age as my great-grandfather.”

Is this a withdrawal, a rejection of her past history with him, or an attempt to recover her pride? It’s a withdrawal;
the face turns to you the whole time, disregarding, effacing everyone around her, wears a radiant expression. She tosses her hair about and looks into your eyes. Even when you look at other people, her eyes never leave you. You seem to share a secret. Suma is the one person you both look at. There seemed to be a hint of collusion in your laughter. Juhayna must have shown him the bruises on her breasts, let you have the details of her relationship with my grandfather, and told you the story of my war against her and my inhuman behavior.

You are standing at the sink in the hall when I come out of the kitchen, pointing inquiringly at the picture on the wall.

It is my grandfather as a boy in his father’s arms, holding a gun. His father is sitting astride a black horse, a sword at his waist, his face exuding an awesome dignity, which is augmented by his kaffiyeh and headband and huge mustache, and the stately saddle with its black tassels. He wears a brocade jacket, and the two of them are surrounded by men with guns and swords at the ready. Although my grandfather’s little face wears a serious frown, it is round and generous, and his teeth are big and white, like a foreign child’s teeth.