…
“A work is never completed except by some accident such as weariness, satisfaction, the need to deliver, or death: for, in relation to who or what is making it, it can only be one stage in a series of inner transformations.”
Paul Valéry was looking intently at me. Tired, I leaned back on the sofa. I needed rest.
“Do you think this is done?” I asked wearily.
“Sure,” Paul replied. “You’re dead. Your work is complete.”
“Oh, good.”
…
The Israeli planes flew so low the sonic boom shattered the windows. Marwa screamed.
“I don’t want to stay here, Mom. Most of my friends have left.”
“Okay,” Najwa said. “I’ve decided. We’re leaving. Go on and start packing.”
“Good.”
Najwa knew this was serious. The Israelis have been bombing Beirut, going unchallenged, for years. This time, everybody thought it would be more serious. The Israeli ambassador in London was shot the day before. No one claimed responsibility. The Israelis would be out for blood. For years, the bombing of “Palestinian targets” and “terrorist bases” had been nothing short of a calculated campaign to terrorize the Lebanese. It worked. She was terrified.
“If they did all that for one ambassador, what would they have done for two, Mom?”
They took a taxi to Damascus that afternoon. She could see, from the high vantage point of the mountains, the planes attacking. This was not going to be a simple cleaning up.
They were at her brother’s in Paris when the reports started coming through. She should have known. Two weeks after the withdrawal of the Israeli forces from the Sinai, they invaded Lebanon. Whenever clouds gather in the Middle East, it rains in Beirut. The price of peace between Egypt and Israel was operation Peace for Galilee.
At least this time, Najwa will not have to go through it.
By the time the Israeli siege of Beirut was in full force, after thousands of Lebanese had died, a small report, in the back pages of the Times of London, stated that the Israeli ambassador had recovered fully.
…
March 14th, 1986
Dear Diary,
Today, I couldn’t stop laughing. Three months ago the Swiss ambassador moved into the sixth-floor apartment of the building in front of ours. Every day at six, the maid would bring him a beer, which he drinks on the balcony. I have watched him do this every day. Today, for the first time, when he finished drinking his beer, he threw the bottle out into the empty lot below. I couldn’t stop laughing. He is Swiss. Today, he became Lebanese.
…
Mohammad was talented. There was no doubt about it. As I began to study his paintings, I realized he was even better than I thought. Most of the art critics who reviewed his work were not Lebanese. I felt they missed quite a bit in his paintings. I learned a thousand and one new things about his painting from their writing, yet they never asked what we saw.
The Baltimore Museum of Art bought one of his paintings and had it on display. Mark and I drove over to look at it. The painting consisted of a simple image, an upside-down jackass, or donkey, floating in water, submerged, with only the legs showing. The perspective was looking down from a high angle at the jackass, in seemingly infinite waters.
It was a beautiful painting. The size was 60 by 80 inches.
The reviewers waxed lyrical. They eulogized the mythological symbolism of the image. The jackass was a symbol of devotion or a symbol of beginnings. It represented The Fool or Magic. The fact that it was upside-down could mean homosexuality. Upsidedown and invert were once derogatory terms for homosexuals, one critic said. They wrote about the meaning of an animal exposing its belly. Surrender. The painting was about surrendering to the flow, surrendering to the unconscious, to life. The floating jackass was Zen-like. Since it was half-submerged, one critic suggested the artist was commenting on his mastery of both intellect and intuition, both technique and genius.
I do not have the acuity, or acumen, to pass judgment on what was written. I am not omniscient. I cannot comment on Mohammad’s thought processes. He never talks about his paintings. I do know, however, something about the jackass. All Lebanese do.
The jackass should be considered Lebanon’s symbol, its eagle. When I was growing up, you would see them all over the place, not as much in the large cities, but definitely in the villages and countryside. They were used for everything, from transporting villagers to plowing the olive groves. Everybody considered them stupid—jackasses, so to speak—yet they were methodical. I am positive most Lebanese would be outraged at the suggestion that the jackass be the national symbol, yet most of my memories of the mountains always include an image of a jackass, carrying a load or a villager, navigating the tortuous paths. The jackass as symbol of our peregrination.
I can already hear a Lebanese objecting to the jackass as symbol, since a Range Rover could do a better job.
As the civil war progressed, one would see less and less of the jackass. Whether they were easy targets for bullets or simply the victim of modernization, they no longer littered the mountainside. It is a shame.
Maybe the art critics were right. The painting could have been about surrendering to life. It is possible everyone was right. The painting could comment about homosexuality, suggest that we surrender to life, and, at the same time, mourn the death of a country. I cannot say, for I know very little about art.
…
While in Paris, Marwa sent a letter to a teenage magazine asking for a pen pal in the United States. She was eleven. She received a sweet letter from a Sarah Miller, age thirteen, from Des Moines, Iowa. In the letter, Sarah told Marwa about her life. The chores she had to do, the cute boys she liked, the new mall that opened, and other exciting occurrences in the happening town of Des Moines. Marwa found it amusing.
Marwa and her mother were back in Beirut when school started again in the fall. She did not reply to Sarah’s letter until she showed it one day to my sister, her best friend. The girls had cowritten a French essay a couple of months earlier, about the tragedy of growing up in war-torn Beirut. They had used overblown metaphors, preposterous tales of woe, and exaggerated sufferings. The essay was published in the Lebanese newspaper L’Orient—Le ]our, and was then actually picked up by Le Figaro. The girls translated the essay into English and sent it to Sarah. The return address was Marwa’s post office box.
The next letter from Sarah brought fits of hysterical laughter from the girls. In the letter, Sarah exclaimed shock at what Marwa had had to go through. It included a thin piece of fruit cake, to ease the pain, Sarah said. The girls did not reply. That was followed a couple of months later by a letter which included a get-well card—Sarah said she could not find a more appropriate card since there was none that said anything about dealing with a war—signed by all her classmates. Sarah had read Marwa’s letter to her class and they all wanted to help.
The girls never replied to Sarah. They had written only that one letter. Sarah kept sending letters, at least one every six months. In those letters she would empathize with the suffering of her “friend” and elaborate on what was happening in her life. Every letter included a little present to help Marwa through her suffering—a No. 2 pencil, a Mickey Mouse eraser, a hair net, a cookie, and so on.
The girls grew up. Both passed the Baccalaureate at the top of their class. They read how Sarah lost her virginity to John. They both studied overseas, Nawal at Columbia and Stanford, Marwa at Penn and Georgetown. They continued receiving letters from Sarah at the post office box.
I heard about Sarah only recently. My sister had just returned from Beirut. She was talking to Marwa on the phone, when I heard snippets about Sarah. I asked my sister about her. She gave me a brief synopsis, then showed me the latest letter Marwa was supposed to have received.
I opened the envelope and read the letter. Sara
h was now considering marrying her college sweetheart. She was still in Des Moines. She was asking Marwa whether she should marry now or wait to make sure John was the right man. She asked about Marwa’s well-being, hoping the constant war trauma was not affecting her adversely. She was including a little present to help ease her great suffering. I shook the envelope to see what kind of present. A single packet of blue lemonade Kool-Aid fell out.
…
She attended the funeral of Mr. Suleiman, at the Greek Catholic Church of Peter and Paul in West Beirut. Another funeral, another wasted life. Her husband sat next to her. She stood, she sat, obedient to the rites. It was a large funeral. She felt eyes on her. She discreetly turned around. He was watching her.
“Hello?”
“Hello beautiful.”
“How could you show up? Why did you?”
“For a chance to see you in church.”
“What if someone recognized you? Is it worth the risk?”
“Yes.”
“You’re crazy. If you wanted to see me in a church, all you had to do was say so. I would go to a church in Ashrafieh or Jounieh.”
“Good. This Sunday then. We’ll go together.”
“Okay, but don’t have any ideas about converting me.”
“I’m going to kill him.”
“No, you’re not.”
“Yes.”
“No. You can’t. I don’t want to orphan my boys.”
“I can take care of them.”
“No. He’s their father.”
“They never see him.”
“That’s not true.”
“I have been ordered, Samia. It’s as good as done.”
“No. No. You can’t do it. Can’t you tell them no?”
“It’s from the top. He’s gunrunning again.”
“Oh, fuck.”
“It’ll be good for you.”
“Is there any chance you can get them to change their minds?”
“No.”
“I could tell him, you know. I could tell him that a friend told me your people are planning to kill him.”
“It wouldn’t make a difference. I would just have to go through more people to get to him.”
“No. You can’t do it yourself. You have to get somebody else.”
“I want to do it myself. I have a hundred guys who could do it, but this one is mine.”
“He has a bodyguard.”
“I know.”
“Don’t hurt him, please. He is good-hearted.”
“Okay. I promise I won’t hurt him.”
“Good. I like him. Don’t let him see you. I would like to have him work for me.”
“What about the driver?”
“Kill him.”
…
Maria became our cook and housekeeper about a month after Scott moved in. She loved Scott and hated me. An obdurate Guatemalan, one of the few humans who refused to bow down to my temper. She was insolent and malapert with me, and the model of love and kindness with Scott. As he was dying, she sent her kids to her sister and moved in to be with him. When he died, I thought she would leave me. She did not. She remained as rude as ever.
One day, a year after he had died, I sat in the dark, crying. I heard Maria come into the room. She kissed the top of my head.
“It’s okay,” she said. “You have to forgive yourself. You did the right thing. It was what he wanted.”
She left me there. She never mentioned it again.
…
In the cosmic circularity of the doctrine of the eternal return, Nietzsche forces together time and eternity. What is, has been, and will be innumerable times at immense intervals. Who gives a shit, I ask you?
…
I am in Beirut, sitting on my bed with Furball, Scott’s Himalayan kitten. He is licking himself clean. My dad comes into the house with a female Great Dane. The dog comes over to look at the kitten, who is completely unperturbed. The dog bites the cat’s head. I jump off the bed to get the dog to let go. I am not as fast as my father, who is already there, trying to open the dog’s mouth. All I can see is the rest of the kitten’s body, sticking out of the dog’s mouth, a ball of fur. My father and I work together to free Furball. The dog, my father, and I move around in a circle. I notice my father is limping. He is the one wounded, not I. We finally are able to release Furball. He jumps back on the bed, and starts cleaning himself again, unharmed, unruffled. Every now and then, he looks at my father’s bitch disapprovingly.
…
The explosion was heard in all of Beirut. The bomb was in Aishe Bakkar. Scores of people died, but that was not the intent. The Mufti, the religious head of our Sunni community, was killed in the explosion. His car was passing through the neighborhood.
That bomb killed my brother Hamid, his wife, and his three children, whom I had never met, on May 16, 1989. The building he lived in collapsed completely. I did not hear about his death till a year later. He was thirty-nine.
…
It took a while for me to realize I was in love with Mo. He is successful, intelligent, and unavailable emotionally. I always fell for that. It didn’ t help that he is tall, dark, and handsome, in a scruffy sort of way. He knew I was attracted to him and made no big deal about it.
I was Scott’s ex, and there were quite a few of us, but of the group, only James and I became his friends. He made few friends, if any. In reality, most of the people in his life got there through Scott. He was at times completely unapproachable.
I never knew what went on between him and his father, but the one time I heard him talk about his father, I thought he was talking about himself. He said his father’s friendships started by avoiding intimacies and eventually eliminated speech altogether.
…
All charismatic energy is basically sexual. John Kennedy, Adolf Hitler, or Jesus, it always was sexual.
…
“Hello?”
“Hey Mo.”
“Hello, Kurt. How are you doing?”
“Not too well, but I think I’m feeling better today.”
“I’ll be over in the afternoon.”
“Ha! That’s what I am calling about. You had better not get out of the house today.”
“Why?”
“Mo, Mo, Mo. You have to listen to the radio or turn on the TV sometimes. Your picture is all over the news.”
“My picture?”
“Slight exaggeration. A composite drawing.”
“Oh. Did we blow up something again?”
“The federal building in Oklahoma City. Scores of people killed. They are saying two of your people did it. It’s a good thing you shaved your beard, huh?”
“Okay. Let me turn on the TV. I’ll see you later.”
“Bye, hon.”
It looked like Beirut. They still think we’re different.
It turned out an American did it. A true-blue American. No one explained how the wires came up with descriptions of the suspects as two Middle Eastern–looking men. No apologies, no explanations.
…
Easter. My favorite holiday. A deeply philosophical time of the year when I ponder what on earth a bunny rabbit has to do with eggs and why, if they beat you, spit on you, and nail you to a cross, you’d want to call that particular Friday a Good Friday? If that happened to me, I’d call it The Worst Friday of My Life. But that’s why Jesus is The Redeemer and I’m just another nobody.
Resurrection is so seductive.
…
He was tied to the bedposts, spread-eagled. She squeezed his testicles, hard. His eyes twinkled.
“Tell me again.”
“He begged me to spare him.”
She squeezed again, harder.
“Tell me how. What did he say? You beg. Like he did. Maybe I’ll spare your
life.”
He begged.
She kissed him.
…
Normality highly values its normal man. It educates children to lose themselves and to become absurd, and thus to be normal. Normal men have killed perhaps 100,000,000 of their fellow normal men in the last fifty years.
R. D. Laing, a British psychiatrist. Need I say more?
…
Backstreet was a bar on Makhoul Street. A tiny little place which was always packed, even on nights when shells were raining down. In any other part of the world, the place would have been closed for being a fire hazard. One entrance, the front, and three tiny windowless rooms on three levels, chock-full of people, a disaster waiting to happen. But who thinks of disasters in Beirut? There was nowhere to stand and it was difficult to move. Everybody was smoking. Jamal told him it was lucky they got in. He had to bribe the doorman. Samir cursed his luck.
Backstreet was owned by a man by the name of Philippe Duke. His claim to fame, and he was famous, everybody knew him it seemed, was he was Georgina Rizk’s boyfriend when she became Miss Universe. When she was crowned Miss Universe before the war, it was the biggest source of pride for the entire nation. No one had ever watched the pageant before. The next day, after the great honor bestowed upon us, the whole country watched a tape delay of the Miss Universe pageant. Women wept with Georgina when the announcer said, “Miss Lebanon, you are the new Miss Universe,” even though they knew it was coming. Philippe Duke became the man.
The bar was stifling. He saw, at the far end of the room, a boy reveal the breast of a girl and kiss it. She laughed and pushed him away. A couple were necking at the table next to that. Jamal kept pushing his way forard. He followed. Someone pinched his butt. He turned around and saw a handsome man smiling at him. “Hello,” the man said. Samir pulled Jamal towards him and told him he was leaving. The cigarette smoke was too much for him.
He was not yet ready for his two worlds to meet.
…
FROM: [email protected] (MR JOSEPH TANYOS)
DATE: FRI, 2 AUG 1996 22:34:18, -0500
SUBJECT: PARLIAMENTARY ELECTIONS
Lebanese Parliamentary Elections
Next week, the Lebanese government will hold its second Parliamentary elections since the “adoption” of the Taif Accord. The requirements of that accord have been waived by the current election law, which is undergoing a court challenge in Lebanon. Election was to be by Mohafazat with electors in each of the 6 electoral districts electing their delegates to the 128-seat Parliament. The districts are: North Lebanon, Mount Lebanon, Beirut, Beka’a, Sidon, and Nabatyiah.
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