Other Lives (11 page)

“Are you back in Lebanon for good?” Wafaa asks me. Her question takes me by surprise and I don't know how to answer. I shake my head left and right, to indicate I don't know yet. Afterward I remain silent. She follows up, “Look for somewhere else, you won't be able to live here. Life here is disgusting, as you can see. The country's divided between killers and killers. We're only hostages, it's just disgusting!”

As Wafaa says these final words, she tilts her head toward Intisar, indicating a secret link between Intisar's words and what's disgusting. Or perhaps simply between what's disgusting and Intisar herself. There was always tension between Intisar and Wafaa, from our university days until now. Perhaps this can be traced back to the secret, short-lived relationship between Intisar and Wafaa's married brother. When Wafaa found out, it was a major catastrophe. Once Wafaa had invited Intisar home. By chance, she'd introduced her to her brother and what happened, happened. Intisar started skipping meetings and appointments with her girl friends. For Wafaa this was tantamount to treason.

Malek is still exactly how he always was. He talks about big dreams, as distant as a rainbow, as Intisar says. He confuses me. I never know when he's joking and when he's serious. He's always sitting on the fence: he defends the resistance and at the same time says Lebanon must remain a unique country within the larger Arab region.

In the past, he used to sometimes say that the Palestinians destroyed the country. But he also says that they're the last resistance movement in the world and we must support their revolution. He likes to talk about his hope that we can fix the country, get rid of sectarianism, and other big dreams that won't work for a country like Lebanon. We start talking about the importance of the role of the Shi‘a as an avant-garde sect to create an alternative culture in the country.

“Stick to your dreams and you'll change the world for sure!” Intisar says without looking at him, as though he were incurable, a hopeless case.

“What… now it's forbidden to dream, too?!” Malek shouts. “I thought that dreams could change the world, but they always end in dictatorships. We still have to dream, though!”

“What's important is that we talk about something practical,” Intisar says.

“You want something practical?” Malek asks, “What are we doing to stop killing each other? Please respond. This is an example of a practical question.”

“We must learn to manage our civil wars,” I answer sarcastically. “We need to create a state-run general directorate called the Department of Civil War Management, a department for the public good.”

“Indeed, that would be a department for the public good,” Rima comments.

How much more hopeful can you get? Bloody fighting is a way of life here. It's a kind of consumption, like alcohol, smoking, pop music and advertising on TV. There's civil war and then there's Gemmayzeh… and Downtown, Monot Street, Hamra, Jounieh, Maameltein and Ras Beirut… There's everything. Things that never meet and that have nothing to do with each other. But although they never meet, they feed off of each other, I think.

I leave the Rawda café and walk toward the hill leading up from the Hammam al-Askari. I leave my friends—the long conversations and shouting and unending disagreements going nowhere—behind me. The sun starts to set slowly into the sea, bidding me farewell as I walk up toward the AUB neighborhood. Motorbikes crisscross the streets, behind me, in front of me, and right near me, roaring like wild animals.

Suddenly one comes up right behind me, flying fast into and then over a stopped car and falling hard to the ground. Its driver lands on top of it. His body falls to the ground and his bike is turned upside down, its motor still running. The driver of a second motorbike starts shouting right in my face, stopping his bike to say that I'm the reason for this accident. It wouldn't have happened if I hadn't been walking in the middle of the street. He says that the driver tried to avoid crashing into me and so instead crashed into the car stopped in front of him. People gather as the wounded driver stands up and shakes off the dust and dirt from his clothes, paying no attention to the blood streaming from his head. He looks at me as though I'm a criminal who's gotten off easily, and curses and swears. Much of his cursing is directed at my mother.

I go back to my flat on Makhoul Street at sunset. I know that another day's passed in God's world and that this country will see more days live and die. The god who lives on top of the world can no longer hear, so when our screams reach him they're nothing more than feeble musical notes.

I'm here all alone after the difficult meeting with friends from my past. How can I adapt to this Beirut—the new-old Beirut which hasn't changed, but which I no longer know? Beirut hasn't changed, but it has lost its soul.

 

I fall asleep and then wake feeling as if I hadn't slept at all. For many years I've only been able to sleep for one cycle. They say that a person can't wake up energized and face the day peacefully if she hasn't slept for two full cycles, that is to say eight hours. I sleep one cycle. When I wake up, I think that I should go back to sleep but I can't. My mind is racing with a list of things that I have to do.

My continual exhaustion accompanies me as I start my day. The difference is that now I'm used to these feelings, as if exhaustion is part of me, not something unexpected that I have to get rid of. It's natural to pass my days with red-rimmed eyes. Sleeping more than four hours a night is unnatural for me. The pain in my legs and feet is part of my exhaustion.

I have come to believe that pain is a condition of existence for certain bodies. To live in our bodies means to experience pain. I've also started to believe that feelings are like this too—always mixed with pain, with bodily suffering. But I can't stay relaxed with the first threads of dawn. I hear the ticking of the clock that hangs on the wall of the furnished apartment I'm renting and which I think of getting rid of every day.

I get out of bed and go to the balcony that faces AUB. In the past, I used to listen to the ringing of the clock on College Hall, before the building was intentionally destroyed by an attack a few years ago. I no longer see the tower between the walls of the buildings in front of me. Almost nothing remains of the memory of the three years I spent at this university. Despite this, my heart remains open.

The light that creeps in from behind the sky doesn't lift the thin veil of darkness from the face of the earth. Indeed this light makes me more fearful—the muscles of my face and body tense. I try to go back to sleep but I can't. Faces of everyone I've seen since I've been back run through my mind. Full lips, youthful faces, tight skin, sleeplessness, drinks, eyes extinguished and desperately sad.

I can't sleep, but nonetheless I go outside to contemplate the sunrise at dawn. I haven't witnessed the birth of Beirut's sun for a long time.

I return to Beirut feeling like I've endured my forced exile like I endure hiccups—hiccups that are constantly with me and have become part of my life.

I leave my apartment and head up to Hamra Street. I'm there before the shop owners who haven't yet started their days. Hamra Street has changed. Even the women walking down it have changed. Their legs are still hidden inside black stockings, though it's the height of spring. Can they really not feel the weather? Or does death inhabit the women of Beirut, wrapping itself up in black clothes?

In the first part of the yoga class I have to get used to concentrating on my extremities. I begin by concentrating on the tip of my nose, so I close my eyes and start to relax. I can't relax while concentrating at the same time. I discover that it's easiest to concentrate on the furthest point of my extremities.

I concentrate on the big toe of my right foot. Without meaning to, I move to my left. I think, I relax, I stop thinking. I breathe air into my lungs and keep it inside as long as possible. I feel the oxygen penetrating my veins with profound difficulty, as though cement walls impede its path. Little twinges grip me whenever the air penetrates more deeply. As though these twinges are the result of the edges of my soul crashing against my body on the inside. I can't do any more.

I leave the yoga class and walk from Hamra Street to Dr. Adam's clinic, the doctor who performed my abortion in the fall of 1979. His clinic is closed. I ask about him and they tell me that he was killed during the last years of the war.

I lost my child long ago. I was twenty-one and Georges was about the same age, or rather he was five years older but I never used to feel our age difference. I discovered my body with him and, although he had some experience, he discovered his masculinity with me. We discovered our bodies and our desires completely, once… twice … three times.

A year into our relationship, I found out I was pregnant and that I had to get rid of the pregnancy. He took me to a doctor, who he said was a relative of his. A well-known doctor who had a big private clinic in Ras Beirut. The doctor was handsome, though to me his good looks seemed too perfect and somehow suspicious. Two days later, I returned to the clinic alone and stayed there for a day and a night. I left in the morning, alone, since Georges didn't come to pick me up.

I left alone, while the cells of my baby, who never became a fact, stayed in a big bin in the operating room. I didn't ask anything: I never saw the doctor again. But from the moment I left, I decided to keep my distance from the man who had shared the discovery of my body, who shared my pleasure. He didn't come to the clinic with me and didn't come to pick me up when I left. At that moment, it was like I was the only one who was guilty. He was simply not there. He didn't lie down on the cold bed, his arm wasn't pricked by the needle, and the old spinster nurse didn't look at him with cold, glassy eyes and ask him, contemptuously and with open hatred, if his family knew about this. This wasn't his experience; it's my experience alone. He didn't share it with me at all, ever. I decided to distance myself from him, but this isn't exactly what happened. I could only keep him out of my life for a short period. Then I went back to waiting for him and loving him.

Now that I have returned from Mombasa, I want to visit the doctor. I want to complain to him about my inability to conceive. Perhaps I choose him specifically because I need to hear that I'm fine, that I can conceive, that this is a superficial, passing problem. Who better to tell me this than the person who took the embryo out of my tender, living uterus and threw it away? But he's no longer here. He was murdered.

I want to visit the places imprinted on my imagination and experience flashes of memories. I've left a man behind me in Mombasa and returned to Beirut. I want to re-tell my story with Georges, not to make it live anew but to feel it flash through my body. But his story is lost, just as he is. Georges didn't follow me and I could never mourn openly. I could never mourn and so couldn't heal. How could I mourn him when he wasn't my husband or brother or father or at least fiancé? He was the father of a baby who was never born. He was just my lover. When a lover dies we bury our sadness with him and can never show it in public.

I have left a man in Kenya and I want to reclaim my story from him, but stories can't be reclaimed. I have to discover the rest of my story with Georges, discover his story and why he disappeared. Which story do I begin with, when they're all my stories? I return for all this, but I don't know that every return is a disappearance, because the past never returns. A return is only another sign of absence.

But what do I have to do to excavate my life, like a gravedigger who isn't yet convinced that the dead won't return?

I also came to take possession of the keys to my house, the one that my father inherited from his father, the keys to a house that has no gates. The house in Zuqaq al-Blat has five entrances, whose gates my grandfather painted different colors: green, yellow, brown and blue. All of them open onto a courtyard that from the entrance of the house appears walled in, though it's only a little bigger than a crescent. We inherited the house from my grandfather Hamza. My old grandfather, whom I only remember from a picture that shows him as tall, with a cane and tarboush. I was very young when he passed away. From Nahil's stories, I've invented a roaring voice for him and I've imagined us hiding from him at the end of the hallway when he came home. I've imagined the sound of the keys to the house ringing in my ears.

Nahil says that no one but Hamza could carry the keys; they were attached to his wide cloth belt, which changed into a leather belt a few years before he died. Salama never dared ask his father for the keys. After Hamza died, Salama inherited the house and its five keys. The first thing he did was to open up all the gates, asking Nadia to leave them open for the three days people came to the house to offer their condolences, to shake hands and console the family with a few words, then leave.

Salama went mad after our house was bombed. A small piece of shrapnel the size of a lentil, as the doctor describes it, drove him mad. It entered his brain and remains lodged there. We were all saved but Baha', who was on the balcony at the time, and never came back. I try to recall that night, the voices and fighting and the decisive announcement that we should leave the house and go down to the ground floor. But then my mother decided that we should stay where we are. I don't know why all of a sudden she decided that we'd stay home that night. Oh, if only my mother had known that my father would go mad and my brother would be killed.

The people who occupied the house after we left for the mountains used only one door. The other four stayed locked. Those strong iron locks, which neither bombs nor bullets could destroy, rusted. The residents made an opening in the wall and used that as the main entrance because it protected them from the bombs that came both from East Beirut and the city center.