Beirut Noir

by Iman Humaydan

  She decided to keep going toward the lighthouse, though it felt a little reckless—or actually a lot reckless, especially at this time of night when no one went to the Corniche except a very select group chosen from the elite of the most hopeless social-welfare cases in Beirut and lovers who weren’t lucky enough to find any other place to be alone. But this was exactly what she needed right now. She remembered the first night she slept over at Khalid’s place in his old apartment, in Ain el Mreisseh near the sea, and how restorative that next morning was, when they sat together on a wooden bench on the Corniche. The mere sight of an empty boat in the middle of the sea frightened her and she asked Khalid about it. He told her that it must belong to a fisherman who was taking a swim nearby. Then he said that when he died he hoped they’d put him in a boat like that and set it on fire. He said that he’d seen that in a film. He spoke about his death with a strange passion and romance, adding that he was imagining that they’d grow old together. When they died they’d have both of their corpses put on the same boat and pushed out to sea, toward the unknown. She didn’t have any clearly formulated reaction to this conversation. Should she be happy that he wanted to spend the rest of his life with her? But no, that isn’t what he’d actually said. He didn’t mention anything about their lives together, only about their death . . .

  The sound of a motorbike interrupted her meditations and she quickly moved on, afraid. She feared that the person driving the motorbike was the hunchbacked man from Abu Wadih’s, but he quickly disappeared into the darkness of the street before she could be sure. She kept walking cautiously for a few steps and then the motorbike came back toward her, really fast, as if it were going to run her over. This time she looked at the driver’s face to confirm her doubts, retreating. It was the hunchbacked man. And he stopped his motorbike suddenly. She screamed so loudly that she even frightened herself, but the man didn’t appear to have heard anything.

  Maya: What do you want?

  He kept staring at her with the same expression he’d had a little while before at Abu Wadih’s. She couldn’t make out any emotion on his face—he didn’t seem perturbed but rather eerily calm. A moment passed before she had the expected reaction to this kind of situation, which is to try to escape quickly. She was more skilled at running away from herself. Facing actual danger at that moment, it took her a relatively long time to comprehend that it was real and didn’t just spring out of her imagination. Despite this late realization, she finally obeyed the urge to escape, running surprisingly quickly given her small legs and her lungs destroyed by cigarettes. The only problem was that she ran the wrong way and darkness was advancing along with her. She wasn’t completely aware of where she was going, she could only hear the roar of the motorbike ringing in her ears as it got closer and closer. It seemed as though her defeat was imminent . . .

  She didn’t know how it happened. Did she fall on her own or crash into the motorbike? But she found herself kneeling on the ground and the hunchbacked man standing across from her staring at her in the same way. She tried to get up but her knees wouldn’t support her. She felt that they were injured but she didn’t look at them and instead kept trying to stand. Suddenly the man lurched from where he was, grabbed her, and helped her get up, but then held firmly onto her arm, preventing her from moving. She couldn’t think of escaping this time, she was staring at the old building in front of her, not believing that she’d arrived here. She was standing in front of Khalid’s old building, all locked up and drowning in the darkness of the street. She remembered how sad she was when Khalid told her they would tear it down soon. Then she remembered the drawer where he used to keep her forgotten things. No doubt he’d made her another drawer in Canada and was reflecting on it with love and care at this very moment while she was here in the grip of this demented man. In this completely deserted neighborhood, no one would hear her if she screamed.

  * * *

  “You don’t recognize me,” the hunchbacked man said in a low, embarrassed-sounding voice. She examined him, baffled; his features seemed to have changed, slowly coming into focus, though he maintained his grip on her arm while he kept on talking.

  “I’m Mahmoud, I used to deliver pizza to you from the place at the end of the street when you lived here.”

  Why didn’t she recognize him before? Perhaps because she saw him at Abu Wadih’s in another context than the one she was used to. Or perhaps she’d erased him from her memory with all of the other memories she had of this place, in this house where she’d lived with Khalid. It was strange how her journey of escape had ended here of all places. Was it her legs that brought her here unconsciously? Or did he force her to take this particular road? She couldn’t understand anything anymore. She, like everything, was in a totally surreal dream and the best solution would to be to surrender to the logic of the dream until it ended and she woke up . . .

  “Of course I recognize you, but let go of my arm!” She tried to free herself from his grip, but his strong arms held her in place. She didn’t do anything to resist. She merely tried to get some control over her rapid breathing. She didn’t want him to know how afraid she was. She thought that if he smelled fear he would become more ferocious. She read somewhere that dogs could identify criminals by the scent of fear on them and therefore would attack them. From that time on she had a dog phobia. Whenever she saw a dog on the road she imagined it would swoop down on her, not because she was a criminal but because it would smell the fear and guilt oozing from her skin. But she could usually control herself, so she went ahead calmly, thinking that she would trick the dog and divert its nose from the passing gust of fear. Yet this didn’t seem to be of any use with Mahmoud. She screamed without even being aware she was screaming: “Leave me alone, let me go! Are you listening? Leave me alone!”

  She noticed that his left eye was twitching slowly and his mouth was twisted downward as if he were trying to pick up a smile that kept falling off.

  Suddenly a rattle-like voice emerged from within him: “I love you.” He said this looking at her as if he were waiting for her to say, And I love you too. It seemed clear that for him what was happening was not assault, as she was experiencing it, but an act of true love.

  She forced herself to speak as calmly as she could: “Mahmoud, I have to go because my family is waiting for me at home. Let me go and I’ll see you tomorrow. I’ll give you my number. But right now I really have to go.”

  He didn’t seem to have heard her and was finishing the conversation by himself. He seemed totally absent but he wouldn’t let her go. Instead he pulled her violently toward him and grabbed her neck from behind. “I know I don’t have money and I’m not educated but I’m gonna make a lot of money and buy a car and get my teeth fixed too—they’re gonna look nice, like the guys you are with. And I’ll order you pizza too but I won’t let you open the door to anyone—I’m very jealous.”

  She was quiet for a moment and then something happened that she didn’t expect. He let her go, turned around, and moved away from her, shouting while peering upward as though he were speaking with someone in the sky: “Mahmoud the Monster, Mahmoud the Monster! Listen to me, the Monster is speaking to you, listen to the Monster!”

  She remained frozen in place, completely stunned, and watched him move farther and farther away. She didn’t budge until she saw him turn toward his motorbike. Then she started running again, even though her knees were hurting. She heard the roar of the motorbike again and ran even faster, though after a while she realized that the sound was still the same distance away from her, it wasn’t getting any nearer. She stopped and turned to see if he was following her. She saw him in the distance driving his motorbike toward a streetlight and then crashing into it. He reversed and then once again aimed at the light and crashed into it . . .

  * * *

  After walking for a quarter of an hour down the dark street alone, she finally got back to the Corniche. Dawn was breaking. She bent over the rail and stared at the empty boat, still in its
usual place in the sea. She noticed that the sounds of the bombing continued, despite the cease-fire the Israelis had agreed to the day before. No doubt they’ll exploit every second before sunrise to bomb whatever they can. They probably hope that this dawn will last forever, while the people who live in the southern suburbs are praying for the sun to rise again.

  Her mind was fixated on a dawn from another time, stuck in her throat—like the empty boat, bobbing in the waves slowly—making it hard for her to breathe.

  Originally written in Arabic.

  Under the Tree of Melancholy

  by NAJWA BARAKAT

  Gemmayzeh

  I am Mr. Kaaaaaaaa. And I am no one.

  I lost my organs, one after the other, and I didn’t do so voluntarily or because of disease or an explosion or an accident of any kind. Now that I’ve atrophied, been pruned and abbreviated into only one of my senses, I wonder regretfully if organ donation wouldn’t have been the perfect choice for someone like me. If I had done it, my organs wouldn’t have gone to waste. Had they all been intact and working together regularly, they would have enjoyed the flattery that the old Armenian doctor would have inundated me with, when I would have brought my organs to him. He would have come to receive them joyfully, repeating in a kind of coughing fit, which changed the Arabic letters ha and ayn to kha in his throat: “Akhlan akhlan wa sakhlan, greetings to the orkhans of Mr. K.”

  Nothing is left in my whole body except an eye, which I feel is a hole. I didn’t say “my” eye, since nothing should be granted to me when I don’t exist anymore. What is incomplete has no identity. What has no identity becomes common property, belonging to a genus and not to an individual. It becomes an unperson. Just like nouns when an article isn’t there to aid them. I lost my own article. It happened one day. It really takes a huge effort to concentrate and remember the date. Perhaps it wasn’t a day, but a divergent, motley mix of units of time that are impossible to measure. All I know is that after the language of people had shut me out, I started speaking a language that I called the language of ayn (meaning both letter and eye).

  I expanded a tiny hole and glimpsed through it heads and voices, buildings and roads. As I was peering into it, all I had to do was grab hold of its edges, breathe deeply, then make one push upward to emerge with a giant, complete body, wearing a hat and coat and carrying suitcases and umbrellas.

  Now I open the eye wide—more than an eye is able to be open—because I know that my continuity is dependent on it, and that when I close it, I will die and everything will disappear. I keep it open, alert, not so I can stay alive but so I can look after the tree of melancholy—to see it sending its seeds out onto the ground and growing with the passing seasons. I testify and I narrate; the language of ayn will disappear with me and won’t be the language of anyone else after me. A faithful partner will depart, untouched by the tongue of any other man. We will die together like an animal whose species was made extinct, after it threw itself into the abyss of nothingness with joy and indifference. Two, three things at the most, I narrate. I utter this world’s breath and I stop. A flicker. A fleck. Then nothing. Thanks, farewell, peace.

  I settle down in whiteness, conscious that I am shaped like a cloud that will fade away later. I sit in doubtful blackness, with the eye closed. My body that no longer exists remains tattooed in me, like life on a dead face that departed without it realizing. I succeed in summoning my organs from the tissue of my garbled memory and they rise, knotted up, intermittently and uncoordinated. Or they come together, incomplete, in a chaos lacking logic or meaning. I sometimes feel myself a cubical board, broken into pieces, scattered around, having no beginning or clear destination. I must gather myself together cell by cell to be heavy enough that I can rise up again, a seemingly complete person, with my particularities and my weaknesses, even if disabled, diseased, or afflicted by the scourge.

  My body—which is no longer separate from me, keeping me outside of it—is unprotected, with no claws or a back; I’m a worm, naked and slimy. It ejects me like bodies eject refuse through their excrement, because it’s become too much for them and has consumed them. Often my own body grows large. Its survival, despite its absence, is the reason for my confusion, since sometimes it flourishes and I don’t know if I’ve passed out or I’m sleeping or if I’m a dream that thinks itself awake.

  Tumescent cities spread out within the folds of the miniature red veins which embroider the eye; half-flawed cities, whose buildings all around me are crumbling one wall at a time. Who could say if this rubble was a window to yesterday? Strange-tasting, bloated cities launch a metallic wail that cuts the veins of the eye and relegate its vision to blackness. Bathing in destruction. Penetrating a handful of sand. Darkness, complacency, and silence. Speechless stars. Extinguished explosions that don’t shatter or fly away, but come together. They shrink. They atrophy. They decay. Black holes floating in the darkness of the universe. That is me. Or in this way I imagine myself, trivialized, so I can find a way to understand. If not, where do I imagine I am right now, and what does the person speaking inside me purport to say?

  * * *

  I am Mr. Kaaaaaaa and I am an eye.

  Only a few things sit with me in the first level of my field of vision. If I rub it, moving the pupil from all the way on the right to all the way on the left, I see a ceramic vase my wife made in one of the strange educational classes she took following my return from “the years of my absence,” as she used to refer to that period. Killing time, I think. Developing her true talent, she thinks, and professes openly. A ceramic vase of a confused shape, which is still in the process of maturing. It remained the color of clay, decorated with a yellow chrysanthemum. The comment on its yellowness did not appeal to its creator, leading to her face turning yellow and her right ear red—indicating a fit of anger. This is in contrast to her left ear, whose redness alerts me that I must make love with her right then, immediately.

  That’s what my wife is like—or what she was like—she would erupt for the most trivial of reasons. She’s like a child. She has short black hair, wide honey-colored gazelle eyes, and a full mouth, which hides two front teeth that make her look like an aristocratic rabbit with lipstick whenever she laughs. Beautiful Jamilah excited attention with her full, taut body and its perfect proportions. Her unrelenting elegance and her mysterious femininity mobilized battalions of bottles, perfumes, and powders, filling drawers and tables if not cabinets and warehouses. Such a feminine woman is like a prairie—you think it is open and relaxed, hiding no surprises, danger, or deception, and then there you are in the middle of the outdoors, captivated, surrounded, closed in. But sometimes I wonder if she wasn’t right, if the yellow color wasn’t actually that of a chrysanthemum and if she didn’t actually possess a true, unappreciated talent, which she never realized because of her bad luck marrying me.

  Like a ball in a game whose name I can no longer recall, it’s not enough for the earth to be grassy and buoyant, full of holes and flags, it needs a favorable wind, flexible arms, and an eye able to estimate distances. One tiny straw and the ball would deviate from its path, away from the holes. Since I lost my limbs and turned into a seeing eye, I became the stumbling block to my wife’s talent that designed, drew, painted, embroidered, and stitched; her marvelous small hands cultivated yellow chrysanthemums on paintings, curtains, cloth, utensils, small tables, and dishes.

  “You put different elements in conversation with each other and harmonize them!” she commented proudly while pondering the decor of the corner where she decided to put me. I didn’t understand in the beginning if this was revenge—though that was the furthest thing from her sensitive, delicate temperament, which would generate streams of tears at the least emotion—or if it was a sign that she now saw me as flaccid, fragile, and weak like a chrysanthemum, yellow and waxlike.

  My wife put me in front of the television the vast majority of the time. Sometimes she put me in the bedroom when she had guests over. When they came, she didn’t
like them to see me as a wide-open eye—a wandering, brazen, exhausted, sunken eye—forced into being a proxy, playing roles it can’t handle in the absence of its fellow senses. In the end, she started not having people over, preferring to go out. This was less taxing on her and I didn’t care one way or the other. But I wondered what compelled my wife to put me in these particular spots so I would be visible from every corner of the house, even from the outside and the balconies across from us and next to us, lying on the old red sofa, the lone remnant from all her late parents’ furniture.

  “The two of them died, one a few hours after the other,” she would say, staring at me grave-faced. I see her look at me like she did her father who’d been half paralyzed, unable to speak or move. I’m sure he was behind her kindness toward me, her sympathy for me, and her accepting my presence in the house that she inherited and furnished, fully and completely, so that I didn’t have even the least contribution to make to it. I believe she chose this corner for me thinking, gratefully, that I was an eye needing vision exercises. So she put me across from things with different dimensions to look at, thinking that I had a narrow sight line only a few steps from the balcony adjoining the neighbors’ balcony and part of their washroom, adding on a respectable amount of the street. This street was shaded by two cinchona trees, the last of their kind, I believe, in all of Gemmayzeh, if not in all the surrounding areas too, indeed perhaps even in all Beirut. And not-negligible patches of the blue sky penetrated their greenness, certainly enough to activate the muscles of this last organ which remained alive and raging in me.

  A fly announced its entrance into my field of vision, buzzing at my left side. It circled around a little, confused, before leaving quickly. I heard my wife moving behind me. She was wearing her red shoes with the high heels that she keeps in a cloth bag and only takes out for special occasions. The clock on the wall indicated ten minutes past four o’clock. This isn’t the usual time for parties. The fly returned once more, on my right side this time, before landing on one of the yellow chrysanthemums. A random idea came to me: Do bees recognize the taste of all different flowers, or do they just haphazardly taste the ones where they land?