He walks and tries to analyze the reasons for his strange transformation, rationally and scientifically. He’s unable to produce a logical analysis. Was that the dream? He keeps walking, keeps thinking, saying hello to the leader’s guards and the army troops who protect the area, the militarized zone.
Everyone here knows him. “Hello, doctor,” “Greetings, doctor.” He always returns these greetings.
It has only been four days since he changed, since the young woman arrived at the hospital.
He will be late meeting Nevine. He’s no longer enthusiastic about their passion for each other. He had once nearly gone mad wanting to be near her. After he separated from his wife, he spent two years without thinking about throwing himself into another relationship. He was very cautious, fearing a drift toward another cycle of blame and reproach because of his continual absences. His time was not his own. He gave his life to time. He didn’t fight it, wasn’t able to fight it or laugh at it, because his profession was saving the lives of his patients and he wouldn’t give up on the promises he made to them.
He forgets himself between the hospitals. He faces death boldly—this he fights, courageously holding onto his sick patients’ bodies to keep them alive. He takes dangerous risks and triumphs. He gambles and wins. When he loses, he’s expended all of his efforts. He would have fought until the end and surrendered nobly. Now when he looks at his body in the mirror, he stares at his face, searching for some kind of change. He asks: What has changed? Where did this fear come from? Who injected me with this horror? He starts to be scared of confrontation, scared to confront death.
* * *
He decides to amble around on the nearby streets. He doesn’t answer Nevine’s call. The ringing continues but he doesn’t hear it. He’s lost in his footsteps. He walks forcefully, drowning in his movement. Sinking. He was in the emergency ward the night they brought the young woman in. He saw his entire life in her face. He saw the secret of life in it. From the moment he beheld it, her face never left him. There were contusions and wounds above her left eye. He knew the face but didn’t know where or when he’d seen it. It was as if he knew it well, as if he were a part of it. Her body was clinging onto the thread of life. She hadn’t died yet. He froze his movements. Of course he didn’t want her to die. But the reason was personal and not merely humane, this wasn’t related to his professional duties alone. He wanted her to live for him. He wanted her.
She was wounded by gunfire from the war in a “mixed” alleyway whose residents belonged to different sects and different parties. A battle of flags was taking place in the alleyway. Which party would raise its flags? You can’t take a battle of flags lightly in a potentially explosive neighborhood. They set off wars and bury young bodies and dreams. That night, the young woman had gone out to her car. At that very moment, bullets rumbled and blood streamed out of a vehicle near hers, quickly mixing with the autumn rain. Bullets penetrated the roof of the car next to hers and the reply came quickly. In shock because of what was happening, the young woman stayed in her car, covered her head with her hands, and bent over the steering wheel. But the gunshot pursued her. It didn’t settle in her lung, though she couldn’t escape either. She sank into a bent position and then into the calmness of the moment. Everything stopped, even the bullets. Her movements stopped. Her tranquil body stopped fighting against the gunfire crossing from one side to the other. They brought her to the hospital. They brought her to him.
* * *
He walks and listens to the sound of thunder. It’s not yet raining. It doesn’t rain gently here, even the rain has become violent. He walks, her face with him. If she woke up from her coma, he’d tell her his life. He’d tell her that he was born to see her.
He smells the calming scent of jasmine and descends toward the most beautiful of all Beirut’s alleyways. Yet he’s still battling a strange sensation of fear. He pushes away a lingering feeling that the leader’s ferocious dogs, the guard dogs, are chasing him. He tells himself that he can feel their panting and that they are silently pursuing him. Then he tells himself: There are no dogs here. The dogs are sleeping in their mansions. He walks cautiously, aware of the crazy traffic, frolicking cars driven in the absence of any laws regulating the flow of traffic and protecting pedestrians from gratuitous death. How many lives have been lost in his hands before he could save them?
Why does he dream of her? Since he first saw her, he has dreamed of her every night. He feels that he has known her since birth, that her soul is like his.
He won’t go back home now. Nevine will call him. Perhaps she’ll decide to visit him or propose dinner together. He won’t answer if she calls him again. She’ll think he’s at the hospital.
* * *
He turns left toward Bliss Street. Every time he passes by here he reads the writing on the wall of the medical gate entrance to the American University of Beirut’s campus. They’re all words that rhapsodize about old Beirut, the Beirut that has lost its architectural identity. He once read on one of the walls the expression, Beirut Is not Dubai. He also glimpses love stories written inside giant hearts sketched on the wall and the names of dead singers under drawings of their likenesses. As he approaches the wall, he glances at the top of the Gardenia Building, where Kamal—who once was his professor and now is his friend—lives. Dr. Kamal sleeps on the sixth floor but mostly lives in his clinic on the first floor. His age is now so advanced that practicing his profession has become almost dangerous, both for him and his patients. Dr. Rashid worries about him and finds it hard to convince his friend to retire. How can he ask him to retire from his most precious identity?
The lives of the AUB students add color to Bliss Street. It’s the most beautiful street in Beirut in his opinion, despite its terrible traffic, lights, and noise. Heavily armed soldiers stand on the sidewalk. He’s used to seeing this and always wonders if it doesn’t frighten tourists and foreign students. The war is coming, the war never left. He feels he is always at war, fighting in wartime and fighting in peacetime. There they are imposing their clout by carrying their “legal” weapons. We should always be precise in describing the weapons used: there are legal and illegal weapons which different factions proudly use to govern their relationships—wars that are sometimes cold and sometimes hot.
The character of the weapon that disfigured her face—a face of such beauty he’d never seen before—doesn’t matter to him. She will live. She must live so he can tell her that they’d met before. He would look after her. He fears he will lose her. He is now officially afraid of death, fearing the death of others before his own death. Previously he had enjoyed immunity to death. Now he was losing his immunity and she was the reason. He had resolved this matter after making peace with death.
But now, faced with death, he feels impotent. It’s a game he hates, the game of life. He rejects it, but cannot elude it.
He left her sleeping in the frost, alone.
* * *
He passes by this place every day in his car. Today he is walking on the sidewalk which witnessed the most beautiful moments in his life, the series of romances which he experienced during his first years at the university. He walks, remembering the names of restaurants and bookshops that used to be here and have now had their spots taken by other restaurants, restaurants with global or “globalized” names that he can’t enter. He won’t forget his places—Uncle Sam’s bookshop and Uncle Sam’s restaurant too, Basha restaurant and the B-25 café. He heard so much about the restaurant called Faisal’s, which in his father’s years at the university was more famous than the university itself. It was just across from the main gate; writers and intellectuals gathered there alongside university students who were, according to his father’s recollections, “more mature than students today—they went to the university wearing suits, respecting the opportunities made available to them, the opportunity to receive a university education.” He wondered about his father’s concern with the suits worn by his generation of university students,
and the relationship between these suits and their academic achievements.
He turns left, going up toward Hamra Street. He passes Stars, the shop for musical instruments that somehow hasn’t yet closed down. The imposing thick, white iron door next to Stars had been the entrance to a video shop that his brother’s friend ran. It had lasted only two years before it closed. He continues a little farther, looks to his right, and then raises his head. That’s where his childhood friend Manal lived, up on the top floor of the large building on the corner where the bar Under Water used to be. That’s the first bar he ever entered and cast aside his self-consciousness around women. He remembers that the bar was through the second door after the main entrance to the building. The shop between the two doors sold used English-language books. Rashid was a shy boy, particularly self-conscious around women, and didn’t brag about his wet dreams like his friends did. He would secretly rent adult films from the video shop near the bar so no one would discover his secret; meanwhile his friends, the other boys in the neighborhood, would watch the films together in one of their bedrooms, when their parents were out, of course. In the bar Under Water, Rashid abandoned his shyness about women’s bodies, touching their secrets. His imagination was transformed there into flesh and blood, into stories words couldn’t relate, indeed into the curves of “Lilly’s” body. He remained self-conscious in front of Lilly both before and after they sat together. Only when she dragged him behind the wine-colored curtain in the back of the bar and put his hand between her breasts then moved it all over her body did he forget his shyness. He used to plan his trips to the bar on the weekends when Manal was away from Beirut with her family, at their house in the mountains.
In her East Side apartment on the top floor of the Sarmad Building, his childhood friend Manal committed suicide. She was twenty-two. During that time, he was practically living in the university library. He had passed his medical school exams. He hadn’t seen her in months. At their last meeting in the Three Roses café, she seemed enthusiastic about a project renovating the interior of a clothes shop, showing him her designs. He noticed that she was calmer than usual. He thought that she had grown up and left behind the tumult that glistened in her eyes. Then came the news one Sunday morning. He was eating breakfast. He remembers every detail of the scene: His house phone rang. His friend Nader was on the line, a mutual friend of his and Manal’s. Nader was sobbing. How did she get the rope? Where did she find the strength to tie it around her delicate neck? How did no one in the house notice that the sounds coming from her room weren’t normal? She locked the door with a key and claimed that she would need some time alone, that she wanted to read without anyone disturbing her. She prepared carefully for her last night. She pulled the rope around her neck and jumped into the unknown. She ended. Since that day, he had put off thinking about what happened. He imagined her neck all blue and purple, and her face bloated with absence. He didn’t want to explore the details; he didn’t want to review their friendship in order to understand the reasons that she terminated her life.
* * *
He walks as though taking revenge on his memory. He takes big footsteps. The face that changed him appears once more to him. Yara. Her name is Yara. Her name suggests another place and time, before they came together. She must stay here, in the world that brings the two of them together. He can’t explain his obsession with her. But he’s dying to know everything about her. What was she doing in that alleyway? He knew she didn’t live there. He’d met her mother. He was self-conscious in front of her agony and completely understood it, even before glimpsing her face. He had an understanding of the suffering of patients’ relatives, but deep within himself he ignored this suffering. Her mother was in a state of hysteria. She oscillated between anger—which she translated to him through a torrent of insults directed against the country and its people—and sarcasm, which would sometimes prompt banter and laughter about her condition and that of her daughter. He saw no other family members, only her mother. He wished he could sit next to her, hold her hand, and transmit to her some of the warmth he felt toward her. He loved the sallowness of her face and lips, he knew them, he knew the shape of her eyes and the nightdress that covered her skin. He had seen her before, in that dream he can’t forget. He dreamed it before he saw her, before he was afflicted by the ever-present disease of fear.
He dreamed about a chair that he put next to her bed in the intensive care unit. Now he walks, holding her hand bound with tubes that provide her with life.
* * *
He walks in his Beirut. This city is like a giant village, a village unlike any other village, or any other city. He used to say that despite its new ugliness, Beirut still enjoys a certain charm that he doesn’t know how to explain. He doesn’t say this anymore. During his walk he searches for a charming setting. By day he tends to move between less ugly parts of the city and those with actual charm, if that’s the right way to put it. He lives in what are called Beirut’s “bubbles.” There are neighborhoods in the city he hasn’t visited since he was a schoolboy at the end of the seventies and the beginning of the eighties; there are other neighborhoods he’s never visited at all.
He carries Yara with him, perhaps he doesn’t feel afraid for her. How can he fight fear when it is percolating inside him, becoming a part of him? Perhaps it is a temporary state. He saw her wounded face in his dream before he saw her in real life. In the hospital he succeeded in hiding his shock. Then when he was alone, his obsessions and fears were born. Was the day’s exhaustion enough to make him hallucinate or was he experiencing the symptoms of some disease? He raises his hand to his face, then sticks it on his forehead. He needs to sleep. Perhaps he will wake up tomorrow and have lost this terrible fear. He needs to pass by and see her tomorrow, because he is the surgeon who saved her from death as her mother keeps saying. He laughs. What kind of savior-hero do others think he is? What kind of savior-hero does he himself think he is? He walks. He is no longer able to move quickly. Tomorrow he will see her. Will she regain consciousness tomorrow? Perhaps he’ll wake up tomorrow and be cured from this disease, from this beautiful curse.
He walks right through the chaos of a long Beirut night. He listens to the distant sounds of fireworks, as if they’re faraway explosions that keep repeating. This violence is the expression of joy; this violence is the expression of all kinds of emotions. He is walking through Beirut while it’s shedding the veneer of civilization. How can a respected doctor like him be so lost? He walks quickly like a man searching for his mind. He tells himself that tomorrow he will resist her pallid face and closed eyes. He will resist her lips that are searching for the kiss of life. Tomorrow he will resist fear. Why is he now fighting against night and its mysteries? He should go up to his apartment to collect himself before sleeping. He misses dreamless sleep, unless Yara decides to visit him. What is this loss that tortures him? He feels her lying beside him. She is here sleeping in his bed just like she is sleeping in the hospital—absent, infatuated with absence, haggard, and beautiful. He wants to sleep, and doesn’t want tomorrow to be like today. This is what he’s gotten used to in Beirut. This is what he learned from it. He should sleep now to live tomorrow, another Beirut day.
* * *
In the morning he has to shower quickly. He has to be at the hospital before eight. He doesn’t think while putting on his clothes. He’s still exhausted from wandering around yesterday. He is also afflicted by the exhaustion of the long years that came before this. He glances up at the sky as he leaves the building. The Beirut sky is so beautiful! The color of the sky here is spectacular. He looks up the whole time walking from home to the hospital. When he turns left the dogs bare their teeth. They arrived early from their morning excursion and have already started their security patrol. The dogs are in charge, he has to smile at them and fully acknowledge their extraordinary capabilities and their terrifying appearance.
When will he hear Yara’s voice? When will he contemplate her eyes, open to the world? He ran
all night long. He ran in his sleep, listening to himself panting. In the dream he arrived at the fourth floor of the hospital. He dashed through the corridor leading to the intensive-care unit. The lights were out. For the first time he recognized the darkness in that room, as if it were abandoned. Darkness enveloped the place and there was no sign of the young woman at all, nor of her mother. There was no one there to ask about what happened to the injured woman who was here just a few hours earlier. Then he woke up to the sound of the alarm clock.
When he reaches the fourth floor, his colleague who had been monitoring her was being paged. Her heart suddenly got tired; his heart almost stops. He still doesn’t understand why he cares so much about her. It’s as if his heart is suspended with her heart. He feels an exhaustion that he’s never experienced before. He peers out the window of his clinic in the hospital at the Beirut sky, muttering, “Oh Beirut sky, save me.” Then he carries on with his day. Her face is an enigma, and she is slipping through his fingers. When he enters her room, he tries to evaluate her sleeping face. If she wakes up, he’ll have a brand-new life.
Originally written in Arabic.
Without a Trace
by MOHAMAD ABI SAMRA
Raouché
I stopped walking in the middle of a path in the public park. Images, ideas, echoes of words sunk into my wandering consciousness. I was struck by the memory of a laughing, silent face, but I don’t know whose. Absentmindedly, I glimpsed a feeble sunbeam on a row of trees at the end of the street where I begin my evening walk a bit before sunset every day. A young woman on a bicycle, wearing fancy exercise gear, passed me by. Then she crossed back in front of me and gave me a curious glance, making me realize I was standing frozen like a statue in the middle of the empty path. I smiled and waved at her, while she wound away on her bike down another path, fading from sight.
Beirut Noir Page 17
