Beirut Noir

by Iman Humaydan

  And all this time, the bastard’s influence over his brother, which he received as sincere affection, was increasing: he gave him lessons in Marxism-Leninism, pushed him to join the Communist Party, introduced him to his circle of friends—all of this without any of it coming to their father’s attention.

  Yet it was the issue of women that finally sealed the legitimate son’s dependence once and for all. One day, walking quickly toward Assaad al-Assaad Street for the first time in years, he glanced anxiously at a little scrap of paper that he held in his clammy hand, on which he’d hastily scribbled a few notes the evening before. A certain favor he’d wanted to ask of the bastard had left him in a state of extreme anxiety for the past several weeks. Every time they met, while he was thinking about it, he’d hesitate, his ideas would become blurred, and he couldn’t manage to say a single word. He tortured his brain searching for the precise words he wanted to use; then, when he finally found them, he recorded them immediately on paper. His memory—highly developed thanks to the arduous retention of barbarous medical vocabulary—preserved them as is, but now while walking, doubts started encroaching, giving him the feeling that he’d forgotten something. Every time he looked at the paper, however, his writing reflected the same text that his mind had been repeating relentlessly back to him.

  Obsessed with these exhausting mental rehearsals, he didn’t realize that he’d reached the street on which he’d spent his childhood and adolescence until the exact moment when he found himself right in front of his brother’s abode. His anxiety about forgetting his memorized speech then gave way to that of remembering his past. And it was for this reason that until now he’d avoided coming to his brother’s place—so as not to give in to the temptation to remember a horrible secret, or perhaps even to discover one. But ultimately he’d understood that he’d only be able to ask this favor that he so coveted if the two brothers could find themselves in a spot completely cut off from the rest of the world—not on the street or in a café or bar, their sole meeting places—so he’d resigned himself to visiting his old neighborhood.

  He threw a quick glance around; the state of near-ruin of Assaad al-Assaad Street aroused no emotion in him. He rang the bell, entered the house, and when the actual moment occurred, his memory betrayed him. However, having realized what was happening long before, his brother said to him abruptly: “You want someone to fuck, right?”

  Noticing that he was stunned, blushing all the way to his scalp, the brother continued with a soothing, protective smile: “Don’t worry, we can arrange everything.”

  Then, in a wavering, barely audible voice—as though he wanted to hide away somewhere and never speak again—the legitimate son stammered, “You should . . . you should . . . you should . . . It would be better if you came with me to . . . to the brothel?”

  The other one tried to get ahold of himself, but it was a bit too much to ask, this shy, startled virgin being so irresistibly comic. So he burst out with a loud, sardonic laugh. Then, somewhat calmer, he said, “A brothel . . . ? No, no, no, that’s totally out of the question; you’ll get a woman, a real woman, not a whore!”

  Women were what the bastard especially enjoyed and what he despised above all. He picked them up everywhere: in streets and bars and at the university. There were more than a few in whom he inspired an intense repulsion, though his successes were by far more frequent: he mistreated them terribly; they suffered but took great pleasure in him. He had one who delivered notes to him at home from classes he never attended, but in which he always succeeded in getting the top mark; another who, every time they spent the night together, put his shoes and socks on in the morning; a third who he often made cry; a fourth who he insulted; a fifth who he beat up; and finally a sixth who he managed completely according to his will. He thus handed this one over to his brother.

  A few days later, barely able to stand up on his own two legs but unable to sit still either, the legitimate son paced in his brother’s house, tripping all over the furniture. He could hear nothing but the beat of his own heart. Big drops of sweat amassed on the edges of his glasses, trickling onto the lenses. He took them off to dry them with his shirtsleeve. He noticed his face in the little mirror nailed to the wall: he found himself uglier than ever. Sitting in bed, calmly smoking a cigarette, the bastard followed him with his eyes and shook his head in disdainful pity. “Calm down, it’ll go fine,” he repeated from time to time. Then they heard the doorbell.

  It’s her, the brother thought, horrified, and rushed to the bathroom.

  Even in his hiding place, fuzzy sounds, footsteps, and muffled laughter reached him. He couldn’t make sense of anything; he saw double, he had vertigo, he sat down on the ground. Food came up through his esophagus; he pushed it back with difficulty, swallowing saliva. He couldn’t stop regurgitating his rebellious vomit, which filled his entire mouth a few times. Unable to resist anymore, he plunged his head into the toilet bowl and let it out. His brother the bastard, who’d had a weeklong bout of diarrhea, had forgotten to flush the toilet that day: a spray of half-digested stew with tomato sauce flew into the tranquil tide of runny, very mushy excrement, and splatters of shit hit him right in the face. He vomited again . . . Then someone knocked on the door, someone called him, but he didn’t have the strength to respond.

  After washing his face, he finally thought about leaving the bathroom but immediately remembered that outside, she was waiting to fuck him . . . How the hell would he get a hard-on? Surely she wouldn’t be able to help but snicker at the sight of his flaccid penis. Better to run away . . . impossible . . . stay in the toilet . . . impossible . . . die . . . but how stupid . . . what then? And he could do nothing but prepare himself once again to leave. Like how a desperate man in a burning building throws himself out a window hoping to fly or be caught by the hand of God, he yanked the door open and ventured outside.

  * * *

  The memory of having lost his virginity in this low, little house on Assaad al-Assaad Street came back to haunt him in his old age—at this belated period in his life, sometimes it even seemed to him that he had been deflowered by his half-brother, the bastard.

  This one procured some other women for him—not too many, but enough to shackle him.

  8.

  Though the legitimate son now fucked regularly, he wanted to fall in love. He couldn’t, however, fall in love with one of his brother’s offerings—those women seemed too soiled. He resolved therefore to find someone himself, and undertook some very discreet research in vain. It happened by chance that the first morning after the summer vacation, he noticed a new female student in his class. He thought for a moment about sitting with her, but the cascades of sweat that poured out of him at this idea helped him to quickly abandon this plan. For the entire first semester, he was content with simply observing her from afar. He finally dared to speak to her and, after saying hello, she responded with a hello back. Possessed by an amorous frenzy, he repeated the same move every morning, but at the end of a month and a half, he understood that he should try something else; so he managed to exchange first names with her, and that was all. In desperation, he confided his love to his brother; the bastard then knew what the origin of his own torment was.

  Indeed, in recent months, the legitimate son had somewhat cooled toward him. Helpless, the bastard could only passively watch the gradual enfranchisement of his slave. He deigned to be much nicer to him, to praise him in front of their friends, to offer him more women, but the other one—so preoccupied by his secret—hardly noticed anything. To his great surprise, the bastard felt totally impotent and sometimes woke up in the middle of the night with terrible rages that he could only calm by banging his head against a wall. And why did it matter so much to him? This was the question that never ceased to torture him and for which he couldn’t even find an initial response. Having tried everything, he resigned himself to it and fell into one of his usual deep melancholies, whose singular ridiculousness, so obvious to him in these circumstances, ma
de it even more intolerable. He’d often thought of suicide before his brother finally came to find him, to confess his passion and ask his advice.

  Keeping perfect control of himself and not showing any fragment of the anger that was devouring him internally, the bastard listened calmly right to the end. Then, after a brief moment of silence, he said to him in a way that he tried very hard to make sound as detached and nonchalant as possible, “Don’t kid yourself; she’s a bitch like the rest of them.”

  The other, outraged by these words, protested with a touching naïveté that she was as pure and chaste as one could be.

  “Whether or not she’s a virgin, I bet you I could fuck her in a couple of days!” the bastard cruelly threw out.

  “No, no!” screamed the other before storming off, violently slamming the door behind him.

  9.

  The idea of fucking her then seized the bastard’s entire being, to such an extent that putting it into practice became the central theme of his daydreams as well as his nighttime dreams. Was it simple vengeance or rather the hope of regaining his domination? He could hardly grant himself the opportunity to decide between these two alternatives, but, finding the idea still there one week later, he made a firm decision to put his plan into action. He first devoted himself to tedious and time-consuming speculation about how he might go about determining this girl’s identity, something that seemed rather difficult, since his brother, with his excessively shy and discreet nature, was not at all the type to let his intimate inclinations show, even to an expert eye such as his. Base and cruel spying, a process he abhorred, would at the end of the day prove to be the only possible recourse.

  So he found himself diligently lying in wait for any unusual movement on his brother’s part—truly too infrequent to be of any use—peering through the windows of his classrooms, until he finally spotted his target. There was no doubt his brother had exquisite taste: she was an indescribable beauty. However, his hope for even the slightest connection with her would be no less than the incontrovertible proof of his total lack of experience in the world. He had to fuck her, to defile her: this would be the only remedy that would rescue his brother.

  And one afternoon, putting on the seducer’s face that suited him so well, he waited for her, leaning against the wall of a hallway that she usually crossed when leaving class. Spotting her from a distance, he pretended to be looking elsewhere, then, after she had overtaken him by several steps, he caught up with her in one leap and whispered quietly into her ear words that made the blood rush to her face and extracted an almost imperceptible smile from her lips. She spent that night with him, though she felt some reluctance about sleeping in this low, little house on Assaad al-Assad Street. The next day, the bastard told his brother everything in minute detail. The legitimate son tried to punch him in the jaw but managed only to put himself in a hospital bed for two weeks.

  10.

  With a broken nose, a bloated face, and a small crack in his skull, he was in an extremely anxious state waiting for his father to arrive from the village. What would he tell him? How would he explain his relationship with his brother? There had never been an explicit prohibition on it, but many hints had already allowed him to guess that his father would find all dealings between him and the bastard repugnant. And indeed he was not mistaken: as soon as his father heard him say the name of his supposedly illegitimate son, he almost extended his son’s hospital visit by a few weeks, but in the end managed to control himself.

  A few clarifications are essential here: This old man in his seventies was a sort of leader of an ancient, powerful provincial family that still strictly observed certain tribal laws of its ancestors. Without dwelling too long on the details, suffice it to say that this family—made up of a number of branches—had for centuries subjugated all the other families in its village and lived according to a very strict code of honor. The changes wrought by this most recent era’s radical social transformations had deprived the family of almost all of its privileges, but this only meant intensifying its commitment to the honor code, taking it to the point of fanaticism. Thus our patriarch compensated for the decrease in his external power with in-house tyranny; he literally had the power of life and death over the some two hundred members of his clan. It was not on his own initiative that the bastard had finally broken with his family; rather, he had been forced to do so by a decree from his father, whose authority he had seriously and continually damaged. This banishment—that many considered too magnanimous a punishment—had fixed him very well: his family despised him, and he detested them so intensely he hoped for no money, no help, nothing at all. However, there was a certain bitterness lodged in his throat, recalling past humiliations and reminding him that he still had accounts to settle. The fortuitous encounter with his brother leaving the bar was in this sense a marvelous occasion for him, which he couldn’t help but fiercely hang on to with extended claws.

  The old man thus refrained from breaking his big, knotted cane over the legitimate son’s head and was content with simply throwing him extremely irate looks while nervously twiddling his fingers around his mustache, under which a terrible grin had frozen. The poor young man, lying in bed and suffocating with terror, searched in vain for a point on the wall to stare at in order to avoid his father’s eyes. Finally, after lifting himself with difficulty off the armchair upon which he had been sitting and heading toward the door, the old man launched these words at him in a calm tone that nevertheless penetrated deep into the recesses of his soul and thwarted any retort in advance: “You will never see him again!”

  11.

  When he heard knocking at his door, the bastard immediately recognized his father’s cane. Less surprised—he had been vaguely expecting it—than irritated, he roughly crushed his cigarette in the ashtray while lighting another and getting up to open the door; the next day, he was already abroad.

  During this brief meeting, the old man proposed the following alternatives: either live in hell or leave the country for good with a certain sum of money. If no clarification followed the expression “live in hell,” this was for the simple reason that there was no need for it: the bastard knew very well what his father was capable of.

  12.

  He liked Europe when he first settled there. But a few months later, a strange feeling started tormenting him. What at the beginning was merely a vague sense of some indefinable thing that he missed turned quickly into an unfounded rage. His bitterness deepened and he started drinking hard, with an unquenchable thirst. It was a frequently recurring dream—in which he saw himself sweating profusely under the shadow of his father’s grin—that made him finally decide to once again tread upon the soil of his homeland, and then to rent his low, little house once more.

  It took no time for the old man to learn of his son’s return, though his warnings, delivered by messengers, had no effect. So he then took recourse in a far more efficient manner: a gang of five, armed with sticks, beat the bastard down. Some people living in the neighborhood found him near-dead in a dark corner on Assaad al-Assaad Street. His hospital stay was much longer than his brother’s had been two years before. Handicapped for life, he left the hospital with a limp.

  13.

  It was months later.

  After the old man left his legitimate son’s room one afternoon, the latter, sitting all alone, found himself bewitched by the gun his father had placed on his bed. He stared at it with ardent, burning, voracious eyes—but from far away, very far away, as though in this way he were forestalling a dark temptation, which, if he approached even one step, would have been irresistible to him. And those terrible words seemed to still be ringing throughout his room, Kill him, prove to me that I shouldn’t regret my choice!

  After a while, he dared to take one step, a second, a third, and then another, and finally he found himself right next to his bed, his head slightly bent over the gun. He wanted to grab it but he merely mimed the gesture and started scrutinizing it again. His anxiety slightly
quelled, his mind emptied of just about every thought, he felt himself gradually being devoured by numbing thoughts whose only focus was this weapon.

  All of a sudden, the fact that his brother had been born on the same day he was—at almost the exact same time—seemed so strange that he was surprised that he’d never perceived it this way before. And then there was the question of the secret he had just learned about the illegitimate birth—that it had been attributed to the other one by the accident of an incidental gesture—which laid bare the contingent nature of his own fate, and through this even its absurdity. All of this caused a shiver of disgust and horror to convulse him as he thought about the 50 percent probability that it was he himself who was the bastard.

  Contradictory ideas quickly passed through his head. As if to stop them, he grabbed the gun, shoved the barrel into his mouth, powerfully clamping it between his teeth and tasting it: unpleasant, cold, metallic. Somersaults of terror, mixed with a trace of pleasure, raced through his body each time he stroked the trigger. He finally made a decision and closed his eyes. But in the dark, small sparks behind his eyelids merged into one frame—first blurry, then little by little taking on more clarity. It was a face—perhaps his brother’s, yes! Definitely his brother’s face, sporting a majestic and disdainful attitude as always, with a broad ironic smile, proud and withering. Anger made him clamp down so hard on the barrel that he broke a tooth. He wanted to shoot, but as soon as he opened his eyes, the image faded away like a dream.

  14.

  The harassment of months of sleepless nights had led the bastard into a habit of hobbling around Assaad al-Assaad Street and the surrounding area an hour before dawn. Dirty roads accentuated the darkness of his gloomy ideas. However, his ruminations quickly took another path: he thought again about his father, their last meeting and the huge public insult he had committed against him, and the impossibility that the man would not take any action against him . . . But how would he take action, this father of his, he wondered while walking down his favorite road, the foulest one in the whole neighborhood. This long, thin, mud-filled alley sprawling out in front of him, in which only a tribe of rats elected to live, gave off an intense stench of sewer and decrepitude, strewn here and there with blackish puddles, torturously snaking through all kinds of garbage, rotten food surrounded by swarms of flies, dog and cat corpses devoured by vermin, charred car carcasses, disfigured, dismembered buildings, and other debris that had become unrecognizable with time. He cherished it, this alley. He nurtured a tender compassion for it; this all seemed to him a perfect reflection of his soul. He had never felt any kind of real sympathy before—for either a human or an animal; he couldn’t remember any moment in his life in which he had.