Beirut Noir

by Iman Humaydan

  I’m with Abu Khalid on this—the Party should be true to its allies even if they are bourgeois. Do you want the Sunni leadership of Beirut to be secretly allied with the Phalangists?

  * * *

  The first thing I thought when I began my new mission of shadowing Margot was that I should go to sleep earlier. I should come up with a dream that would take me away every night. The war, battles, dead bodies, severed heads, imagining my own corpse and its putrid smell after days in the sun at the end of a hot Lebanese spring—this is not the material for a soft, dream-filled sleep. Thinking about women and drinking a lot of wine—I started actually preferring it during my mission—both had the power to anesthetize me like a tired bull. But which women? Those who I encountered didn’t excite me or make me think about their bodies, the movements of their hands, the shape of their breasts, or the distant memory of sex.

  Like Naheda, the tall, thin, fierce woman who fearlessly carried a gun and used to say to the comrades who desired her that she had canceled out her virginity “a long time ago—I gave it to heaven.” She used to toy with me even more, saying that she didn’t need “outside intervention. That way I’m never grateful to anyone.” But she’d have sex with me as if she were following military orders—perfunctory, and at regular intervals. “This is a physical need, we shouldn’t give it too much importance,” she’d tell me, justifying herself as she quickly and restlessly picked up her clothes, put on her pants and belt, and strapped her gun to it.

  As for Aida, my old college girlfriend, she’d returned to her family’s peaceful village in the north. Friends told me that she’d developed an interest in makeup, jokes, and eating seeds and nuts all the time, so she’d gotten fat. She’d also started refusing to attend local Party meetings with the excuse that she was only used to working with students and that she was reconsidering her ideas. On the few times she visited me during the war, I felt her distant from me, not only in the newly unmeasurable size of her body, but also in her asceticism toward sex, and perhaps toward me. So in my mind, none of the warmth that used to sweep over me when she touched me remained, only reminders of an ancient coldness. I didn’t start drinking until after she’d left, to try to forget. Then I’d wind up drunk, only to wake up hungover and go to the center with one thing in my head, to die in the dark and leave a will that said, Put some apples on my body and write on my grave that I was the worst son of Adam ever to walk the earth and heavens. Oh my grandfather the priest, never accuse me of virtue and hating the lust of the flesh!

  * * *

  Occupation: Internationalist, Arab Communist freedom fighter, holder of permission to drive a personal car, postman, and keeper of dark secrets.

  * * *

  When I drove her car, a blue Renault 20, for the first time, I opened the back door for her and she smiled and said, “I’m not a leader, a government official, or a diplomat—why are you doing that?! I’ll sit next to you.”

  I didn’t know what to do when escorting her around. “Come with me, don’t wait in the car. If you’re bored of our conversation, read this book in another room.” Or she’d tell me during lulls in the artillery shelling that her friends’ balcony in Ain el Mreisseh is nice and overlooks the sea.

  At that time, I still couldn’t recognize that she wasn’t inviting me to be a kind of friend, that she only took notice of me because of her kindness. Her behavior was different from the comrade-leaders’ instructions ordering me, as an escort, to act as her equal. They didn’t care much about what we did. Hours passed with us waiting in places far from their meetings, languishing in cars—bored, anxious, staring at passersby—searching for a camouflaged assassination team, with our hands on our machine guns laid out on our knees, or standing in the doorways and entrances of buildings.

  She asked me if I knew À la recherche du temps perdu by Marcel Proust. I answered that the French literature course we had in the Lebanese baccalaureate program stopped at Baudelaire. She smiled and said, “You all are a little conservative.”

  “He’s the pioneer of the nouveau roman,” she then told me when she gave me Alain Robbe-Grillet’s novel La jalousie. “I should’ve started with Les gommes, which contains the declaration of this new literary trend, but I lost my copy, I’ll look for it again.”

  When we were alone in the few repertory cinemas in the Hamra district, my breathing would get shallow as I monitored my silence next to her. I didn’t dare turn toward her, except to look out of the corner of my eye, until I wished I were cross-eyed. My God, how unjust you are! I didn’t want to interrupt this impossible happiness. This used to happen at least once a week. I’d feel less anxious when her friends would accompany us, as she’d be less likely to notice what my facial expressions gave away.

  Three times, her breath came close to my face unintentionally. Two times because of cannon shelling coming from the other side, and the third a nearby explosion. This is how I tasted her perfume, the sweat of her fear, her summer shirt, her chest, the feel of her arms, and the viscosity of the gods. After those two minutes, taking refuge in my instinct to remain, she then emerged with a slow, gradual distancing of her two scrutinizing eyes—since her body was still whole—before exposing her smile: “Nothing, it’s only a warning. I’m a statue, I’m a willing tool, I’m an ice-age nebula, please sympathize with me and do not look at me as a human being.”

  Margot didn’t just introduce me to Citizen Kane and new cinema—Death in Venice, A Clockwork Orange, Truffaut, Fellini’s Amarcord, and The Godfather by Francis Ford Coppola—but also to a more diverse world through the films we watched together on party missions, like Battleship Potemkin and 41 Bullets. The language of books, movies, novels, and the faces of Margot’s friends segued from my mission to my insides. A combatant doubting the war, its words, its beauty, and its weapons. A Party loyalist searching for something outside the party in passion, in madness, in silence.

  She became all of my time. When I waited in “my” big apartment, empty of everything but her ghost. Or in her apartment when she sometimes invited me to share a French meal with her, or when I went out to survey the area around the house and speak to the people who knew me by my assumed name and knew that I was guarding the doctor’s house and escorting his wife around, or when I lingered around reading in a room or on the balcony of one of her friends’ places, or when I drove or exercised by her side on the Corniche near the lighthouse in the morning when the bombardments had decreased, or when I was swimming near her at Sporting because she invited me to: “Did you come to just sit there like that? Come on, enjoy the sunshine and water and forget the shelling.” Or when I spied on her body, modestly and bashfully, watching her joking with her friends and acquaintances. She became all of my time that had changed. Even when Comrade Jalal conveyed his messages, fearing my incipient forgetfulness, I started asking him to write them down: “Comrade, I am afraid I won’t do the job the way it should be done.” He’d answer me, without suspecting the real reason, that he didn’t like writing as it could be dangerous, though sometimes he’d give in to my request.

  * * *

  My eyes: hazel-colored, not at all like my Uncle Elia’s green eyes that were a bit blueish. My maternal aunts, grandmother, and my mother always said that because of this, he alone deserved the most beautiful and richest young woman in the area. We lost him. But he didn’t care. He had an adequate horde of women when he sadly approached fifty without having married or produced a descendant or heir. We kept searching and suggesting women to him but he always responded, “Why do you all want me to be chained to one woman for the rest of my life? I am a man who loves freedom and fun. Children . . . for what? What use are they? What use have I been to my father?”

  * * *

  Height: 165 cm. Very short, not fit for the police, only for the army corps.

  Educated, enrolled as a second-year student in the social sciences at the UNESCO campus. Most of my professors are comrades in the Party or the Lebanese National Movement and aren’t bothered b
y my repeated absences from classes. They understand who I am. I live off my work, officially a secretary in the department of social affairs, but I haven’t gone to the office since the area it’s located in became hostile.

  Sect: means nothing to me. I scratched it off my identity card three years ago. In any case, I gave up using the card after “Black Saturday,” and since then I’ve only used the card of a comrade in the Democratic Front. My name on that one is Mustapha Masoud. This means I have several assumed names: Steif to friends, Abu Sakhr to everyone else, and Abu Sukhur, the affectionate version, for my closest comrades. Comrade Kamel, who works as an Arabic-language professor at the Faculty of Arts in the Lebanese University and is responsible for bringing us culture, called me this when he saw me on my first military training mission in the south. “You, comrade, are a qabaday, your body is like a rock, so you are Abu Sakhr—father of the rock—not the rock of Saint Peter upon which Jesus built the first church, but Communist ones.” My father and my grandmother again.

  * * *

  Abu al-Izz, I know you will tell Abu Khalid everything: my eyes won’t carry the great emptiness coming, embroidered with death. I stare at it and it colors me in hell. I embrace its body stretched out in my words. From the beginning of this night, you ask me, “What if I were ill?” And I couldn’t talk to you and answer your questions while I drank myself into a stupor. I know that you opened up an investigation and that you won’t close it until you know everything. Therefore, note that I wanted you to talk to me about this. You will say that you didn’t do it because you didn’t know anything. Was it up to me to talk? The glasses of whiskey that I choked back all afternoon hit me like shelling in the Battle of the Hotels. A 60mm mortar cannon can damage a nearby building from behind, even when you can’t see it directly. In this way, I aim my shot glasses at a place that I can’t see myself and scorch it with gunpowder. Twenty, thirty shots that night became my only bridge to the spectators. It was as though, for all my desire and lust, I was nothing but a step on a tall ladder whose rungs broke each time I climbed up them, causing me to fall. Comrade, I want her to stay and I know it’s impossible. I’ll go mad, I’ll kidnap her, but how and where will I go with her? I’ll kill him . . . This won’t make her love me, and the Party will punish me and never forgive me. I’ll kill both of them and commit suicide. I’ll press my hand against her neck and squeeze firmly while my lips speak to her lips in that sex that I imagine overflows in her sentiments.

  Abu al-Izz, advise me on a good coffin made of oak. The Red Oak Tree, as the comrades call the Party. Not just an old piano box, like the one you play. I don’t deserve either of these. As a lover, I am a dog. I love with no right to, and without hope. Abu al-Izz, I’ll kill you if you relate this to anyone.

  * * *

  When Comrade Abu Khalid informed me that she was returning to France, I was like someone hit by a stray bullet: a bit of time passes before he reacts or responds, and only after he sees the hot blood spurting out does he cut off the flow. “Comrade Jalal’s wife will travel tomorrow via the Damascus airport with the help of the French embassy, which will take care of everything. You will stay with him. She recommended this when she learned she was leaving because she really trusts you and finds you effective. We made the decision that she will travel abroad because things are getting worse. Asad is going to reach Beirut, we’re organizing our resistance, and there’s no point in her staying and distracting us with minor issues.”

  * * *

  When I left the center I was only thinking about one thing: her staying despite the bombings, her comrade husband, the Party, Abu Khalid, my grandparents, my uncle, Philomena, God, traditions, laws, and the war.

  * * *

  “Hello, George,” she said in Arabic, opening the door to me, revealing what I’d told her a few days earlier about my real name, a one-time disclosure.

  Jalal greeted me from the living room, “Welcome, Abu Sakhr,” though he surely already knew my real identity.

  “Will you eat supper with us?”

  I lowered my gaze when she looked at me. “I’m tired. I don’t know, perhaps it’s an epidemic this summer.”

  “Okay . . . but come on in and relax a little bit.”

  “No, I prefer to go to sleep early.”

  “Then wait a moment for me,” she said. I reached out my hand and she passed me a sheet of paper. “This is my address and my telephone number in Paris if you want to abandon your wars before they’re over and complete your studies or work in better circumstances. I will do what I can to organize things for you, and Jalal will help you if you ask him to. I’m leaving early and I won’t see you tomorrow.” She grabbed my hand. “I’ll miss your company, thank you for the lovely companionship.”

  Jalal stood up and said, “See you tomorrow.”

  * * *

  What do you want, Abu al-Izz, dear comrade investigator? Now at the end of another glass, you can close the report for which you’re the only witness. I’ve closed my life on an open identity. I lost the war, the Party, and my passion. I won’t submit my resignation and you won’t submit your official report. I’ll return tomorrow to take care of Jalal, the apartment, the party, and the roads. Exhausted, I’ll carry the burden of a long rupture with myself.

  In my eyes open to blackness, suddenly

  the last sky that I’ve seen awaits,

  taking me toward the abyss,

  the uselessness of a traveler without a destination,

  a singer who suddenly lost his soul,

  a toy car lost in the congested streets of the one playing with it,

  only madness emerges from loneliness.

  Originally written in Arabic.

  PART III

  Waiting for Yesterday

  The Thread of Life

  by HALA KAWTHARANI

  Bliss Street

  At nine thirty the autumn creeps slowly toward Beirut’s night. The first hospital looks like a hotel with no guests, and the second one looks like hell. People are crammed into it, running toward life, breathing heavy, hanging on to its edges, to its fingernails, to sparks flying from it, and life shows them no mercy. She hurries to flee, her sarcastic laugh rumbles, and she becomes more talkative. She doesn’t stop or stumble. Life goes on. It also happens that it stops suddenly. That occurs right away, after a huge explosion goes off in the narrow Beiruti streets, between ugly residential buildings and the gaps between them, gaps that used to be houses in the old days, unpreserved history whose value no one knows and no Beirutis care about.

  Only minutes after the explosion, people are already wondering how the crime was perpetrated—from what was used to the details of its planning. They partake once more in a new horror movie. Was it a car bomb or a bomb planted in a tree or a handbag left in some prearranged spot? The place becomes famous, it becomes the location where life paused. The place becomes a hero in the eyes of the television cameras and petty politicians. Life ends outside the place where so many human lives were ended. Beirut suffers from a brief spell of amnesia, afflicted by both short- and long-term memory loss. The tape is wiped clean from beginning to end, and it starts all over again.

  * * *

  Dr. Rashid leaves the hospital. He had parked his car in a spot across from the political leader’s house, near one of the area’s three hospitals. This is the mansion-hospital to which it’s difficult to move emergency cases, because the leader lives here and the roads around his house are always closed. Dr. Rashid knows that the leader’s dogs eat breakfast at seven in the morning, then arrive in the neighborhood at exactly nine o’clock. The people in the area set their clocks by the leader’s dogs’ schedule. They sniff rocks and humans, walls and cars, shop entrances and buildings. The leader’s life is always in danger. And the dogs are among those “responsible” for protecting it.

  Sitting in his car, Dr. Rashid decides to walk instead. That way he won’t have to worry about searching for a parking spot later. He is not in the mood to deal with traffic. He walks
. Strange feelings of fear overtake him. For the first time, he experiences the horror he sees in the eyes of his patients. He never used to be afraid, and didn’t pay attention to his patients’ fear. His “professionalism” prevented him from reacting to their psychological pain. Experience also prevented him from having an emotional response. Observing large numbers of patients in their last stages of life, patients bidding life farewell, clinging to each breath, light, and voice. He sees young mothers saying goodbye to their children, fathers trying—after their last, incomprehensible words—to keep their children away from their final moments on earth. None of these scenes disturbed him before. What was happening? Why was he afflicted by this oversensitivity right now? How can he prevent his tears from showing? How can his eyes swallow them up before others see them? Who afflicted him with this reaction? What has he been injected with? What dream has changed him? What vision?

  He walks down May Ziadeh Street. He’d fallen in love with the name of the street even before he was convinced to buy his apartment. It is near the hospital and close to his heart as well. It’s important to him to fall in love with the places where he lives and rests. He’s had enough of the sufferings of the hospital, the smells of disease and death. Thus, it’s important that his apartment be comfortable, that he can find the life in it that he’s been losing in the hospital.

  He walks under the jasmine plants that extend over the walls of the Asseily Building. Gibran Khalil Gibran Street intersects with the street named for that other Lebanese literary figure, May Ziadeh. May and Gibran never met in real life. They only met on paper, in letters they exchanged. Gibran’s attempts to meet May weren’t good enough. They never met. His desire to meet her didn’t equal her desire to meet him. But the two streets meet. There are jasmine plants on Gibran Street too. Dr. Rashid loves jasmine; he often boasts that he lives in the only jasmine zone left in Beirut. It is also a security zone, as they have started to call closed streets around the houses of political leaders who fear for their lives. These zones strangle the people of the country a thousand times a day. They’ve transformed the movement of cars in the city into a trap out of hell, or one long nightmare. He remembers that he was reading about battles on the nearby street named for Michel Chiha, the writer and intellectual. His leftist cousin was killed there by a bullet to his abdomen. He was walking between Michel Chiha, May Ziadeh, and Gibran Khalil Gibran.