‘You didn’t bring your friend with you?’
‘Samir?’
Waddad turns around and nods.
‘Didn’t think of it,’ Aneesa says. ‘Here, let me finish the washing up.’
‘It’s all right, habibti, I’ll do it. Could you call Ramzi up from downstairs?’
Aneesa puts her handbag on the kitchen table.
‘Whatever it is smells very nice,’ she says as she walks out.
Looking down at the car park from the balcony, Aneesa watches Ramzi making loops and circles with his bicycle in the fading light. His head is sunk deep into his raised shoulders and though she cannot see his features, she imagines his eyes have squinted into slits with concentration and his top front teeth, still slightly large for his child-mouth, are pressing hard into his bottom lip.
Aneesa leans into the railing.
‘Ramzi,’ she calls out a couple of times, but he does not seem to hear her.
She takes a deep breath, sticks out her chin and tries again.
‘Bassam!’
Ramzi stops, looks up at her and waves but Aneesa is too stunned to respond.
‘It’s time for dinner,’ she finally whispers to no one but herself.
Samir is tidying up the kitchen before going to bed when he hears a knock at the door. Aneesa has been crying, her eyes are red and her hair is dishevelled. Samir motions for her to come in and when she does, she stands for a moment by the front door, her shoulders pushed up towards her ears and her hands clenched in tight fists. He shuts the door behind her and takes her by the arm.
‘Come,’ Samir says gently. ‘Come now, Aneesa.’
They sit side by side on the sofa in the living room with only the side lamp on. It is not cold but Aneesa still has her jacket on. She sniffs loudly.
‘I just put Ramzi to bed,’ she says.
‘That’s good.’
‘Mama’s gone to sleep as well.’
Samir only nods.
‘I had to get out of there, you know?’
Samir reaches up and touches Aneesa’s hair. It is not frizzy like it was when he first knew her but has waves in it now that end in wisps around her head. He smooths it back and as he does so feels her snuggle into the crook of his arm. This close, he can smell the dampness on her cheeks and hear her breath going in and out. He leans his cheek on the top of her head.
‘Samir?’ Aneesa looks up and he lifts his head again.
‘Yes, habibti?’
She sits up and he removes his arm from around her shoulders. They look closely at one another.
‘What if you stayed here?’ Aneesa begins. ‘What if you didn’t go back?’
Her eyes, even at this time of night, do not look any darker but rather deeper, as if they had receded further into her thoughts.
‘Remember that night we all went out for dinner together, with my father?’ Samir asks.
She nods.
‘You had on a long black dress and these long earrings.’ He gestures towards his own ears and they both laugh. ‘I’m sorry, Aneesa, that I didn’t tell you then how beautiful you are.’
He leans forward and kisses her tenderly and when he holds her, he can feel her sigh into his body.
Everything has been cleared out of his parents’ flat and, despite the still solid walls and the furniture, to Samir it is like an empty shell, although it has occurred to him that the hollowness he now feels might be inside his own heart.
Will I ever be able to live here? he asks himself. Not alone and not with all these memories. He is equally reluctant to let the place go; with it he sees the last tenuous connection with his past vanishing away. Yet there have been times since his return to a much changed city when he has felt himself at one with this new incarnation of Beirut, with the rough, less sharpened parts of it which sometimes make him feel slightly embarrassed as if in merely not understanding these incongruities he can disassociate himself from them.
Beyond his flat, he abhors the obsession with wealth that seems to have taken over everyone here. What happened to the middle classes? he asks himself. Is it the war that drove them away to seek futures that this country can no longer offer them? In returning, he believes he brings with him an accurate judgement of what has become of Lebanon, though Aneesa often faults him on that. What, she says, would you expect from this place after what its people did to it and to each other? He knows there is truth to her question, but is certain as well that something valuable, something Lebanon once possessed in abundance, is absent now and he does not think it will ever return. Perhaps, Samir ponders, I am forcing my own sense of loss on to what I am experiencing today. He is doubtful also that in leaving Beirut for good he would be able to brush this unfamiliar distaste away and thinks that it will haunt him always, even as he tries to disown it.
One morning, standing in the doorway of his parents’ bedroom, he is startled by a rush of wind that pushes through the open window pane and rustles the half-open blind. Leaning out to shut the window, his head halfway through it, he sees on the wall beneath, the morning sun moving with the shadows just as it did when he was a child, delighting him yet again. Samir straightens himself up again and stares down at the Corniche. It will go on with or without me, all of this, he thinks to himself.
Unlike Salah, Samir is not accommodating, nor does he encourage in Aneesa an aspiration for greater eloquence. Instead, he often leaves her clinging more tightly to her intransigence as if in doing so she might succeed better in persuading him when, in fact, the exact opposite is true. But she is happy to be with him and this, she thinks, has something to do with their shared past, their mutual knowledge of a loving but puzzling Salah. Together they make firmer Salah’s presence in the world until she is no longer so conscious of his disappearance.
This evening, Samir has arranged to take all of them, Aneesa, Waddad and Ramzi, to attend a musical concert in a local theatre. There will be an oud player and an accompanying orchestra and Aneesa is looking forward to listening to Arabic music again.
‘I didn’t even know they held these types of things in Beirut any more,’ Samir says once they are all standing in the foyer of the theatre.
He is happy to be in this crowd of people who are clearly accustomed to these sorts of occasions. It is not a large crowd but it is an animated one. Samir has not forgotten how exciting Beirut can be but in his solitude has thought he would never again fit into its exuberance. He reaches out and pats Waddad on the arm.
‘How about a cold drink?’ he asks her before turning to Ramzi. ‘Come on, habibi, let’s go and get some refreshments for the ladies.’
If Waddad were honest with herself, she would admit that rather than joy, she is suddenly aware of a huge sense of loss. She watches Samir and Ramzi as they walk towards the kiosk, the back of Samir’s head slightly flat, looking vulnerable and unappealing at the same time, Ramzi’s arms hanging limply by his side because he is unsure how to move in his new jacket. She watches them and wonders why her life is suddenly filled with so many unknowns, people who are practically strangers and situations in which she does not quite fit in. Even Aneesa, in her long red skirt and her hair falling silkily over one side of her face, even her daughter seems distant and unfamiliar tonight.
She also wonders about Aneesa’s other life and realizes that her own preoccupation with finding Bassam did not allow any other thoughts to enter her mind, not even those that had to do with her daughter and of what had really happened to her during her time away. Perhaps Aneesa had fallen in love. But if she had had someone, then why did she leave him and return to Beirut? And hadn’t Salah been quite old when he died?
Waddad looks down at her feet and feels a slight buzz in her ears. She does not know if she will ever feel whole again. When she looks up, Ramzi is walking towards her with a drink in each hand. She reaches out and touches his hair.
‘Thank you, hayati,’ she whispers so he cannot hear her.
Ramzi sips at his juice and feels the collar of his shirt di
g further into his neck. He reaches for his tie and runs a hand down it as he’s seen other men do. He would have preferred wearing something more comfortable but Waddad had been so excited about these new clothes that he knew he could not disappoint her.
When a bell rings to call the audience inside, the four of them make their way down to their seats. Samir sits on the aisle seat next to Aneesa with Ramzi in the middle and Waddad at the other end. They take off their jackets and look around. The auditorium is shaped like an amphitheatre and the performers are in the centre with the audience rising in a semi-circle around them. The lights are dimmed and people’s voices begin to taper off.
‘It feels very intimate, doesn’t it?’ Aneesa whispers to Samir.
He nods without turning to her so that she has a clear view of his profile outlined against the faint light. It is not a striking face but there is beauty in it, an indication of inner fortitude. She places a hand on his arm and he smiles.
Samir senses that if he looked at Aneesa now, if he were actually to see the happiness that he can feel vibrate so fiercely through her body, there might be an end to indecision. I would simply remain here and begin again with her and the others, tentatively at first and later with stronger resolve. What does place matter, after all, as long as Aneesa is here?
Samir places his hand over Aneesa’s and before he can turn to her sees the performers come on stage. There is loud applause as the oud player sits on a stool at the centre and places his instrument on one knee. He smiles at the audience and waits for his fellow performers to take their seats before beginning and Samir feels his determination dissipate.
When it begins, the music is so familiar that Aneesa almost jumps up in her seat. The beat, kept by the derbakke player to the left of the main performer, is fast and light, and the sound of the oud is filled with a tenderness she recalls only from childhood, notes trilling after each other until the whole sounds like water rushing down a rock cliff or clouds shifting across the sky. There is an air of melancholy in the melody that fills the part of her she has always associated with home. She imagines herself, for one moment, on the stage, moving in and around the musicians, diaphanous and light.
She looks at Ramzi. He is nodding as he listens to something Waddad is whispering into his ear. On the other side of her, she senses Samir’s pleasure without looking at him, the outlines of his figure already in her memory. Aneesa is suddenly conscious of a connection to these three disparate people as though, for this moment at least, she is the one bond that brings them together. She feels the sharp edges of the music that envelops them move along the surface of her skin, and shudders slightly.
When the music comes to a stop and there is a roar of applause, Aneesa remains still in her seat. Is this, she asks herself, my family now?
Samir and Aneesa have dropped Waddad off at the orphanage and are on their way back down to the coast. Aneesa is driving and has opened the two front windows to let in the clean mountain air.
‘Is Ramzi happy here, do you think?’ Samir asks.
She is wearing sunglasses and he cannot see the reaction in her eyes.
‘I suppose he’s used to it by now.’
‘I wonder how he feels about Waddad’s idea of him?’
Aneesa turns to look at Samir.
‘Idea?’ she asks abruptly, her eyebrows rising above the rim of her glasses.
‘I mean her thinking that he is Bassam. It must be strange for him,’ he continues. ‘He is just a child, after all.’
Aneesa overtakes the car ahead of them.
‘There are some things you don’t understand, Samir.’
‘You’re probably right. I’m sorry.’
Aneesa eases her foot off the accelerator slightly as they begin to descend the hill. She takes a deep breath and looks at Samir again.
‘It’s all right,’ she says softly.
She moves the car further to the right and stops on a ledge overlooking the city. From here, Beirut is merely a cluster of grey concrete buildings. It is not beautiful, Aneesa thinks to herself, despite the sea and the blue sky. She misses the expanses of green, the leafy trees and grass that once fascinated her because they were so different from pine and gorse bush and red dust beneath shuffling feet. She misses the peace she had found overseas, the seeming certainty that she would remain safe as long as she stayed away from Lebanon. Perhaps, she muses silently, I can move to the mountains, to some quiet village where the war has not been, where no one knows me and where I can be alone. She imagines herself in a small house, bending over a wood-fired stove; she is old and alone but happy. Then she laughs at the absurdity of the thought.
‘Aneesa?’ Samir interrupts her thoughts. He reaches over and touches her hand. ‘What are you thinking about?’
‘Sometimes you remind me so much of your father. You show the same kind of refined gentleness when you’re with me. Loving gentleness.’
He stops caressing her hand and waits.
‘But Salah was never in love with me.’
Samir remembers the two of them walking through the front door hand in hand, she with her gloves on, his hands bare and red with cold. They are always smiling when they are together. He is certain she is wrong. He shakes his head.
‘It was Salah who insisted that I come back here,’ she says and hangs her head.
‘He loved you, Aneesa. I am certain of that.’
She says nothing.
Samir feels suddenly brave.
‘Will you come away with me?’ he asks. ‘We’ll leave here. We can take Waddad back with us, Aneesa. We’ll never have to return. We’ll be happy.’
She lifts her head and looks beyond him, through the window and at the city she knows is the only home she will ever have. In those hidden streets, around corners and at the end of alleyways, is her family of past and present, her father, her mother and her brother Bassam, the people she will come to know in time, those who will stay, those who will leave and others whose presence and importance will fade. From this distance, she can feel the pulse of Beirut and her part in it. She moves the car back on the road and continues the descent down the mountain.
‘Let’s just go home for now, Samir? Let’s just go home.’
Ramzi can feel himself changing, not so that he looks or sounds different but in the way he feels about things and in his manner. He no longer waits on Sundays for his mother to arrive at the orphanage to reclaim him nor does he allow himself to think of his father and the sadness that they have both left behind. Instead, he is happy at the certainty that at the end of each week he will go down to Beirut to his bicycle and to his bedroom, to Waddad and Aneesa and to a sense of home.
In the dorm room where he sleeps, Ramzi spends time on the inside window ledge where the bird cage once sat. The bird died some months ago and though he misses the sound of its voice he is happy to be in its place looking down into the verdant gorge as the other children sleep. During the day and while in the classroom, he wills himself to focus on the task at hand. When lessons are over he runs quickly out into the playground, feeling the air and the energy push so hard out of him that he imagines they might one day propel him into the sky, over the earth and far away. The things that once mattered, showing the younger children at the orphanage how to play basketball or keeping his half of the cupboard in the dorm room tidy, no longer do, although he is uncertain why.
On the day that his mother finally comes to see him, Ramzi is taken completely by surprise. It is mid-afternoon and he is sitting in the inner courtyard with some of his classmates while the younger children nap indoors. One of his teachers approaches and tells him the directress wants to see him. As he gets up and walks through the familiar archway and across the outer terrace to the office annexe, Ramzi is aware of a sudden but certain quiet surrounding him. He thinks perhaps that it is the lull of the hour, sometime between day and night, between activity and rest. He feels a listlessness gurgle inside him that is akin to premonition. Standing on the terrace for a moment at so
me distance from the ledge, Ramzi looks to the right so that he sees only the hills and not the valley below. In his mind’s eye, the sea that embraces Beirut is not far beyond. Perhaps, he thinks clearly to himself before going inside, this is the right place for me after all.
It is very late but Samir is unable to sleep. He looks at the outlines of Aneesa’s body lying next to him and turns on to his back. Once his eyes are used to the darkness, Samir can make out the chandelier hanging from the ceiling. It is made of brass and has a flat disc at the centre with four branches descending from it. On the end of each of them is a glass flower into which a bulb is fitted. The whole thing is very feminine and does not give out very good light.
He remembers the day his mother brought it home with her.
‘It’s beautiful, isn’t it?’ Huda had looked at him before turning to Salah. ‘For our bedroom, I think, habibi, don’t you? I just couldn’t resist it.’
Salah nodded and looked at Samir.
‘I suppose I have no choice, eh?’ he asked, smiling, but Samir looked away.
‘It’s lovely,’ Huda had protested. ‘You’ll learn to love it, Salah, you’ll see.’
Samir sits up abruptly. You were right, mama, he thinks to himself. Even I have grown to like it.
He looks down to make sure he has not woken Aneesa, then he pushes his pillow up against the wall and leans back against it. He takes a deep breath and looks down at Aneesa again. He reaches out to touch her and when he feels her stir, pulls his hand back again. Outside, there are no sounds coming from the Corniche, and Samir realizes that he is feeling suddenly, inexplicably happy.
Samir is driving them up to the house in the mountains. He has not been there yet and Waddad is anxious to show it to him.
‘It belongs to my husband’s family now,’ she says. ‘I suppose we could start going up there again if we really wanted to. I think you’ll like it, Samir.’
He remembers this road from the trips he took with his parents as a child.
‘We used to come up here often,’ he tells Waddad, who is sitting next to him in the front seat. ‘My mother loved to look at the old houses and I liked filling huge containers with water from the village springs.’
Dreams of Water Page 16
