Beirut Blues (31 page)

We went back to the car, where Ali was waiting patiently, and drove to Sharia Fouad I. I stared intently at it as it flashed past. We stopped once more, this time at an official roadblock. The man said our names weren’t on his piece of paper. Ali got out of the car to see what the problem was, and although we were uneasy at not going straight through, we began to study the shattered remains of the houses and villas and the trees on either side of the road with leaves like green lace and an orange tinge all year round.

A few minutes later we were at the last checkpoint right beside the Museum. It looked just as it had in the past, as still as the graves and statues inside it. There was always an air of coldness about it, as if it had been forgotten opposite the Hospital for Boys and Children, which only had two letters of its name left.

Jawad said that every time he went past in the bus as a
child he wondered why it wasn’t just called the Hospital for Children. He used to want to be a patient there, surrounded by toys.

Ali said good-bye to us at the Museum crossing and I told him to expect a phone call from me, and urged him not to lose my list of phone numbers. Jawad’s eyes rushed ahead of his memory, feeding it material as we walked away from the car. The buildings and the policemen’s uniforms were the color of sand. He used to come here at the end of every month with his grandmother to see his uncle, who was a policeman stationed here. They would ask for him at the police post and after a few minutes he would emerge with his mother’s medicine, which he obtained at a reduced price. Jawad always envied his uncle’s police tie and had once asked if he could have it.

I noticed I was no longer so eager to visit the eastern sector. My heart used to pound in my chest like thunder and lightning until I could see someone waiting for me with a car. Even though I had telephone numbers and addresses with me, I used to entertain all sorts of notions, of which the main ones were along the lines of “What if the fighting suddenly starts up and they’ve forgotten to come and meet me?” or “What if the man at the barrier decides to stop me crossing? It would be like holding a flower up to my nose and having it snatched away.”

Here there were official checkpoints and others which came and went according to the changing situation, and whether you got through or not sometimes depended on the mood of the people manning them, the views of the militia, or the politics, which changed from day to day.

On my previous visit here when I was only a few steps away from the eastern sector, I had been stopped. The soldier manning the checkpoint looked through my papers and asked me why I wanted to cross.

“I miss the sea at Jounieh,” I joked.

“If you miss it, why aren’t you living here where you can see it, and showing them how wrong they are? West Beirut belongs to Iran now.”

I said nothing, but smiled, and to my astonishment he wouldn’t let me through.

Even though he had withdrawn the flower before it reached my nose, I kept smiling. He was angry that the city was divided, just as I was. He wanted to express his anger. There was no harm in that; we were both young. He wanted a discussion and so did I, but it wasn’t going to work. A taxi driver drove up to me when he saw me going back, and opened the car door for me, cursing the militiamen. He seemed to have taken it upon himself to get me across whatever my reasons for wanting to go.

He said they’d been just the same when his son was trying to cross in the other direction. Even when he’d told them his journey was vital, they’d refused to let him through. At that point there had been a sudden burst of gunfire from the western side of the crossing and the militiaman had called him back. “If you want to cross, go ahead,” he’d said, smiling.

“Did he go?” I asked the driver.

“Just to spite them, the fool.”

The taxi traveled at speed along winding backstreets, across crowded thoroughfares, and down deserted roads until
we reached a piece of barren ground. He told me to get out and walk across it. “When you see the Pepsi-Cola sign, it means you’re in the right area. There are plenty of taxis there and they’ll take you wherever you want.”

I wasn’t afraid when he left me on the wasteland. The sight of the sunshine and a distant building with washing hung out to dry on its balconies gave me courage and I set off, sometimes sinking into the sand and sometimes walking on hard dry earth. I was glad to see a few olive trees growing there. They had roots like faces which had been through the war. Even though the main road appeared close, I found myself walking and walking. Was this really happening to me, or was I walking through the vines to have a picnic with my grandmother and Zemzem?

When I got near the Pepsi-Cola sign, it seemed to be saying, “You’re safe now. You’ve arrived.”

Would I find my friends, or would my stumbling progress through earth kneaded with urine turn out to have been a waste of time? Just thinking that I was alone in this sector of the city made me sad and a little uneasy, for this was my city too and I had begun to forget its familiar landmarks.

I spent that night in Jounieh in a room overlooking the sea and was plagued by mosquitoes, as the black coil of repellant went out for no reason. I got up early and went out onto the balcony and leaned over the railing.

Facing the distant mountains, which listened and watched, I wondered why I didn’t live here. But I had the niggling feeling that my friends were strangers even in their own apartment and weren’t aware of what the road outside
looked like, of the trees that grew round about, or the cocks crowing.

They were refugees living alongside other refugees, and had endured the woes of war and been driven from their homes, so that their vision had become clouded, their humanity a little blurred, and they began to pounce on opportunities of work and elbow out the original inhabitants. I went into the living room. The sight of the empty dishes brought a lump to my throat, reminding me of yesterday’s dinner when my hostess had brought together people who had been at the university with us, the majority of whom had moved in around here over the past months, when their life in the western sector had become impossible. I reproached one of them for not visiting me as he had promised. “Have you severed all your links?”

“God forbid. But I’ve had to wait around, had some problems. You have to get used to life in this sector.”

I called my grandmother and she sounded far away. She asked me if the eastern sector was really the jewel they said it was, sparkling with nightclubs and restaurants. I turned around to look at my friends’ chilly expressions. “I’ll tell you about the jewels later.”

My presence among them must have reminded them of the reality they were trying to forget. Everything was new: their addresses, jobs, homes; only their cars were the same. They had recognized what was going on in the country and settled in these new homes, which they cared nothing for, even though some of them had grown up here. For them the heart of the city was in Sahat Al-Burj and Hamra, in their
memories of the rumbling of the streetcars, the neighbor’s voice and the low warm gurgle as she smoked her hookah, the frangipani opening overnight. They tried to hang on where they were, scared of what would happen if their patience ran out, but there was a lot of pressure on them from either side of the divide. Sometimes they rushed back to the bosoms of their families, where they felt a sense of security, for there are times when a person only feels safe in his own surroundings, where he doesn’t have to watch what he says, or apologize, or justify the activities of individuals from his own community.

My friends still took a keen interest in the news that reached them from the other side. When it was sad news, they chose to believe that the people they knew had escaped unharmed, but they were less discriminating when it came to the reports of how the streets were crammed with men in beards and women enveloped in black, how Iranis were thronging in, new mosques springing up all over the place, Qur’an recitations droning on from morning till night; the streets had all become alleys, sheep pens, chicken runs; at every corner, in the garage of every building was a prison for foreigners and Christians; every Christian who entered the area was pounced on by two men like Solomon’s devils who impaled him on a fork from hell; aircraft only landed to disgorge weapons and fighters. The gulf between the two sectors was widening, not because the access points were being blocked with rubble and iron fencing, but because each was going its own way.

Where I lived they thought the eastern sector was a jewel
suspended between heaven and earth, connected to both by beautiful white bridges, where everything was magnificent: the restaurants, swimming pools, shops. Gesticulating and using their French words, the people there referred to the western sector’s inhabitants as if they were dirty, ferocious animals. The phalangists’ cedar-tree symbol was on every breast, a gun on every shoulder. Sports cars and armored vehicles raced through the streets. Ships unloaded gold and arms in the ports. The sea, the mountains, and the streets were protected by high walls, reaching to the sky.

Jawad draws my attention to the white gardenias everywhere; even the chewing-gum vendors have them, and the beggars hovering around a little table in the middle of the sidewalk where men sit playing backgammon, a few feet from large piles of garbage. Drivers have them stuck behind their mirrors and they quiver with each blast of the horn. Street traders’ barrows are decked out with them. There are solemn groups of people at intervals, buying and selling around once elegant shopfronts, poring over secondhand books and magazines, lining up for cut-rate fuel at a mobile gas station, waiting at the movie theater. Jawad says they look like mourners at funerals, and many of them, too, are carrying gardenias.

Jawad points to the open sea and the peerless sky and exclaims sorrowfully over the tall concrete buildings which block out the view. He searches for the old houses with red-tiled roofs and wooden windows painted red and green, wondering why they always stuck to those two colors. “Goodness me! A ghoul has eaten a bit of the sea!” he cries
suddenly. “Goodness me! A ghoul has swallowed a big chunk of mountain!”

I laugh at his imitation of a village way of speaking which reminds me of my grandmother, feeling warmth and love towards him and wishing he would rest his head on my thighs.

“They think they’re making a Riviera,” says Jawad scornfully. “A Riviera coast! And over there they’re creating Karbala! That shows they’re both the same. And yet the place is divided in two. They both suffer in the same way, whether they talk about the war or not. Chasing here and there armed to the teeth to secure flour, fuel, medicine, wasting their time and destroying their nerves in all this instability and chaos. Look at them! Their cars are falling apart. And the refugees aren’t happy whichever sector they’re in.”

I smile, pursuing my own thoughts. The expressions on their faces are the same. Their children, like ours, are only aware of the country’s historic monuments from pictures in books, and all they’ve ever known is sandbags and toy guns. People here justify theft and petty crime just as we do, attributing them to poverty and need, while the old people sigh over the past, and take present events as a personal insult.

On our way to the Cedars we went along the coast. I looked out on the left and told Jawad I was looking for the Tzigane restaurant. He didn’t ask why or seem surprised that I’d caught his disease. It was more as if he had handed me very clear photographs which had lain untouched in a cardboard
box and kept their original brilliance and color; as if the accumulated layers of the past had not been buried under years of war, and the present had accepted its wounds and recovered enough to bear fresh ones.

I stared out at the salt pools where we used to turn bronze after one day’s bathing and where I could swim without any effort. Jawad still wondered, just as he always did when he was a child, why there was nobody guarding them. He asked me if it was far to the army checkpoint where Simon was supposed to meet us.

Simon was sitting behind the wheel of a car, waiting for us. My thoughts flew on to the green meadows and the bare pale hills. Did the bus really leave from here with us chanting, “Hurry, hurry, driver. Yours is the best bus ever. Put your foot down and go fast. We’re the cleverest girls in the class”?

When I was getting ready to go on a trip and Zemzem was boiling eggs and potatoes for me, Haja Nazar used to visit my grandmother. These visits annoyed her, especially when Haja Nazar cried, “Don’t let your granddaughter go up to the snow. It buries human beings.”

“Come on, Haja Nazar,” replied my grandmother gaily. “Asmahan is much too clever to let the snow hurt her. They’re all girls from good families at her school. The Sursuq girls are there.”

I didn’t want to take the eggs Zemzem had boiled: they were a strange color because she’d boiled them together with the potatoes. She gave in to me and made me some more eggs, clattering the pot about and swearing.

The sun set in a flood of color when we were still on our way to the Cedars. At the Syrian checkpoint I felt suddenly anxious. Simon had said we would follow a car sent by a relative of his high up in the army, and it was true we had taken an unexpected route to reach the checkpoint. A Syrian soldier appeared, glanced towards us, then signaled to us to go through. After a while we noticed that in every village there were only a few houses with lights in them and the rest were dark or lay in ruins. Music played from a balcony amid a buzz of talk and laughter and Simon told us that if a house had lights on, it meant its politics fitted the current climate; those in darkness or leveled to the ground were the ones with the wrong politics.

As night descended on these villages, we were able to discern the inhabitants’ political inclinations. Tranquil village life, when people had disputes over simple things like the rights to a well or a tree, was a thing of the past. I felt blissfully happy to be here with Jawad, seeing things through his eyes, and I was grateful to him for scraping the rust away. But I still hadn’t decided whose room I would share that night.