Originally written in Arabic.
The Death of Adil Uliyyan
by ABBAS BEYDOUN
Ras Beirut
The café was almost empty. Two men were sitting at a corner table playing cards with unusual silence for a game around which crowds of spectators usually gather and work their tongues. They seem to be playing more from boredom than anything else, faced with empty tables and pervasive silence. I sat down and after a while one of them, a young, khaki-clad man, approached me. As he walked over, I could make out that he was older than I had suspected from a distance. He shook my hand and asked me what I wanted. When I ordered tea, he told me that the water had been cut off since the morning and it would be better to order a Pepsi. I agreed, in order to avoid further conversation, but the man kept standing right there in front of me, not moving. He stared at me as though waiting for me to recognize him. Then he told me that he knew me. He said he was Samir Uliyyan, the son of Adnan—Adil Uliyyan’s brother—who had apparently told them a lot about me; I am Jahal Mazhar. He told me that Adil had come back from Beirut ill, that they had found something in his stomach. I asked him where Adil Uliyyan was living, and he said that he had built a place in Rweiss, on some land he had bought there.
I didn’t meet Adil Uliyyan until we’d both moved to Beirut. I’d moved here before him, to attend the American University. I rented a house and settled down in the city. But I’d heard what had happened to him in Beirut and most of it was what I would have expected: cruel machinations and scams. He traded in elections. He’d go up to a village and choose a candidate who he was convinced could be the victor. He’d use his influence over certain officials, telling them he had to have a certain amount of money. It’s not important what the ballot boxes said plainly the morning of the elections, he would capture the amount needed to win, then disappear. I heard that he’d belonged to influential parties during the war, struggling within them to achieve a certain rank, rallying around and causing trouble until the party leadership got tired of him and kicked him out. But he always found his way to another party, wreaking havoc within it until they too were exasperated with him.
During the war, he was well suited to join in the killing, quickly becoming one of the war’s rising stars. He spent three months in a military training course and returned from it an officer in the Pioneers of the Revolution unit. As a military man, he could do what he liked. He could refuse orders. He could call on anyone he wanted, mobilize people around him. He could also organize big operations: stealing cars and coming away with a diverse fleet; his comrades had a habit of driving these cars wildly and wrecking them, creating excellent parts at low prices afterward. They would also sell furniture from houses they’d pillaged, and extort the rich and influential in exchange for protection.
The war destroyed political parties and organizations; military wings prevailed, as did the logic of war itself. As soon as killing starts, as soon as human life becomes cheap, then everything is allowed. As soon as people acquire the right to annihilate human life, they become lowly gods who consider everything available, and any material possessions as offerings for themselves. They become idiots, using their whole lives to snatch up whatever comes into their hands. They exist only to expand their authority, committing all sorts of transgressions. After the second or third operation they are liberated from any type of self-reflection and start to believe in themselves—of course, most of the time not giving value to anyone else’s opinion. It can’t hold up. From the moment people start to cross lines, thought becomes weak and can’t defend itself. Each individual must build his authority with his own hands, necessitating an increasing number of transgressions.
Adil Uliyyan—according to what I’d heard of him—did this. I heard that he was extremely reckless and killed more people with his own hands than all the rest. He once walked up to a customs officer in the Beirut port and emptied a cartridge of bullets into his head in front of a group of people. From that time on, no one dared oppose him anymore, even his comrades started to fear him like they would a god. He had killed a man in cold blood and he did it for show. His aides completely submitted to him out of fear; in the beginning, their way of thinking united them. Of course, a way of thinking is only useful as an excuse, an empty excuse. What really unites and equalizes people is fear. The one who inspires fear is the master—but this equality is frightening, since no one knows who will be the first to initiate something, who will be the first to transgress. Adil Uliyyan was the first, and it cost him just one murder. From that time on, he profited from everything. A relatively guaranteed sum came to him from every operation; it was protection money from the aggressors, the ones who extorted money through their racket.
One day, fear caused someone to raise a gun and empty it into Adil Uliyyan’s body. The man went into hiding after that. It was said that he had fled to Brazil, but afterward Adil Uliyyan was bedridden and when he recuperated he was no longer himself. He staggered when he walked, his body shaking violently, his limbs trembling. Despite this, the person who shot him didn’t come forward and feared him even in this state. He had no doubt that Adil Uliyyan could still kill him. His disability made him even more terrifying: those trembling limbs could strangle a person, suck out his bone marrow, squeeze his heart. People waited for him to do something but he didn’t budge. In this way, he remained the very image of fear itself. He was fear trapped in a shaking body—his fingers quivering; his two eyes open and ready.
Samir Uliyyan told me that after they found something in Adil’s stomach, he moved from Beirut to Sanawbariyeh to rest there. I didn’t know if I should visit him; it is true that we had been . . . I don’t know how to put it . . . friends. I’d meet up with him from time to time, until we both left Sanawbariyeh. We were friendly when we were first becoming men; but we were comrades, nothing more. Every day we’d cross the village together. He was a liar and I wasn’t. He was outgoing and I was shy. But those were the days of our innocence. Even in all his lies and exuberance, Adil was innocent back then. Who would think that an idle lie could transform into a crime? Who would imagine that shyness and indecision could transform into intrigue? But innocence can show through lies, it can show through shyness. It can be idle chitchat, it can boast, it can rave deliriously and go into a coma. No one knows what it will lead to.
I didn’t know if I should visit Adil Uliyyan, or if we should even meet again. After all that time that had passed, it would be like a conspiracy, a meeting of the smuggler and the thief. What would the two of them have to say to each other? What could members of the war generation have to say to one other? Who will they accuse if time turns against them, if they end up as miserable criminals, miserable smugglers, miserable thieves? They won’t accuse either God or destiny, since they know that they are acting without either of them. They won’t accuse anyone of treachery, for this is what they have to expect. They have gone so far with their own treachery that they have even forgotten what treachery is.
Despite all this, I still wanted to visit Adil Uliyyan. I thought that perhaps he had something to give back to me. I thought that he owed me something; I didn’t know what it was but the time we spent together had somehow indebted him to me. When I first met him, he was writing, or imitating really, using the very same hand to do it that he’d used to empty bullets into the customs officer’s head. I had a shameless desire to hear him narrate this . . . a shameless desire that I was ashamed of when I realized it. I wanted my roaming comrade to narrate it to me as though it were a lie that I couldn’t possibly believe even if we’d been sitting in a holy place that compelled us to tell the truth. To tell it like he invented his love story with the curate’s daughter.
Can we go back to those places that prompt us to the truth, and still lie? Can we narrate our lives as though they didn’t happen? They did happen, but what is left of them in our souls is no more than a lie.
I decided to go visit Adil Uliyyan.
* * *
Rweiss isn’t far away; it�
��s a rocky cliff at the edge of the village. When I arrived, I didn’t have to ask where Adil’s house was. There were three floors with wraparound balconies and tinted glass, crowned with red tiles. Inside the flower garden was a wall and in front of the wall was a square of pavement where three cars were parked—a Cadillac, a Chevrolet, and a Peugeot. I rang the bell and a Sri Lankan servant looked down at me from the balcony. I asked her to tell Mr. Adil that Jalal Mazhar was here. After that, the gate opened and I entered, walking toward the house on a path paved with cobblestones.
The servant opened the door and led me to the spacious living room, which was surrounded by plate-glass windows on all sides. The sofas, tables, and walls were all gilded. After a bit, a taller-than-average, well-built woman, wearing a tight-fitting green dress, came down. Her black hair hung to her shoulders. Scrunching her eyebrows, she said that she was Rosette—Adil’s wife. When she realized that I didn’t know who she was, she said that she was from the village and had heard all about me from Adil. She’d married young, moved to Beirut, and from that time on seldom returned to the village, so she’d never met me. But she knew who I was. She sat down in front of me on a gilded sofa, crossed one leg over the other, and offered me a cigarette from her pack of Kents. When I refused, she took the cigarette herself and lit it. She told me that Adil was in his room on the second floor; he’d just finishing shaving and would be down shortly. I mumbled a nervous question about his health and she replied that the doctor had reassured them—it would definitely be a long process, but the illness had been found early and he was responding well to the treatment.
Rosette showed me around, answering my questions about how the house was organized. As I had guessed, the first floor was essentially a huge living room with groups of sofas scattered throughout with a bar at the far end. The second floor was for the family—bedrooms, a dining room, and a family room. The third floor had a large kitchen, a pantry, a sitting room, and guest rooms. We went up in a glass elevator. This was a vacation home, Rosette started to tell me. I could only imagine what kind of palace the family lived in during the rest of the year. We didn’t encounter Adil on our tour around; he was still in the bathroom. Back on the first floor, I expressed the desire to wander around the flower garden, and Rosette seemed eager to accompany me. I looked at the flowers; the gardener readily volunteered to name the ones I couldn’t identify. We went back inside and sat down in the living room.
After a while we heard the elevator door open. Rosette and I stood up and stared at it. A tall man I didn’t recognize stepped out. I assumed that this was Adil Uliyyan. He was the same height and had the same dark coloring that I remembered. But those two things were all he still had. He was mostly bald with little hairs scattered across his head. His face was covered in wrinkles; deep trenches in his face gave it a permanent scowl. He walked extremely slowly, one step after the other. He made a great effort to lift his torso, though this couldn’t hide the fact that his back was starting to hunch over. Rosette hurried to his side but when she tried to hold his hand he rejected her with a wave. I felt hesitant about approaching him, so I let him walk over to me. When he reached me, he stopped for a second to secure his footing. He extended his hand to me with the same deliberateness. That’s when I noticed how emaciated he was.
He said, “Welcome,” nothing more. He was facing a round sofa and started to fold his body slowly to settle down on it with exaggerated composure. He wasn’t swaying, but he looked like someone who was trying hard not to fall down. His eyes were sunken and moved in their sockets with the same slowness as his body.
“The war . . . took us . . . young men . . . and . . . alienated us so often . . . from where we came . . . afterward . . . left us back . . . on our trash heaps . . . on purpose . . . you . . . they towed . . . your boat . . . for you . . . I . . . I . . . as . . . you see . . . I was . . . I became . . . a cripple.”
Adil tried to appear as if he were in charge of his mind and body. As he sat on the sofa he recuperated somewhat. He was exercising his control over the situation. I don’t know what he’d prepared for this meeting but he’d certainly known about it beforehand from his brother’s son Samir. He was definitely struggling to appear worthy of his mansion, but his words seemed to make him feel regretful, his eyes moist with tears that wouldn’t fall. Then he asked me, “Do you still read? I still write. Rosette, bring me the file.”
After his tearful moment, she was pleased to comply. Rosette walked upstairs to the second floor and came back with two thick, leather-bound volumes. Written on the first one in gold letters was, Secret Conversations of the Dust. The Tenth Floor was written on the second in the same lettering. Adil handed me both books, then took out a thick notebook that contained reviews of his books. I flipped through it and my eyes passed over words like “the great novelist,” “the creator,” “the innovator,” “He delves into the depths of the human soul,” “soaring,” “an incredible imagination,” “penetrating wisdom,” “masterful philosophy,” “modernity and postmodernity,” “innovation,” “avant-garde literature,” “the revolutionary soul,” “destruction and ruin,” “deeply rooted structure.”
The pages I was holding in my hands were replete with all kinds of praise and commendation, though the clippings displayed a pitiful absence of either well-known or meaningful names. Adil then handed me his treasure—a stack of translations into French, English, Italian, Spanish, and German—not with prestigious publishers, but that doesn’t matter. By all accounts, Adil Uliyyan had been able to start from nothing and put out a book. It cost him less than his garden did. He bought the book and its publishers for a price less than what he paid for his fleet of servants. I thought that everything in the world must be off-kilter if it occurred to someone like Adil Uliyyan to play at this kind of game.
Then he handed me two more books from the stack. One of these was Modernity in Adil Uliyyan’s Fiction and the second, The Thought of Adil Uliyyan. Two professors—neither of whom I’d ever heard of—had written them. There’s no doubt that he’d given each of them a little money. I imagined him slipping it into each of their pockets while making a show of the fact that money was not the issue here, that it’s best to negotiate with your eyes closed.
But I don’t follow literary criticism and I don’t know if Adil Uliyyan has a standing in literature . . . or indeed if any of these “critics” made any difference or not. It would be strange if all of this praise was merely there hidden away in his file, and had come to pass without anyone noticing it. It would be stranger yet if Adil had succeeded in exploiting his writing in the same way he succeeded in his other ventures. What will remain of literature if it becomes a matter of financial exploitation? The cost of fashioning a writer like Adil Uliyyan would be less than that of opening a shop. Adil didn’t actually admit that he’d paid for the book and I didn’t expect him to do so either. But this was his sole exploit about which he never mentioned money.
He remained on the sofa all taut as a bow. He was wearing a thin black jacket and gray trousers. His shirt was hanging loosely off his body and was fashionably untucked. He handed me the articles written about him page by page, waiting for me to read each one before returning it to the file for safekeeping. While I was reading, he observed me with steady eyes. I gave him the pages back without comment, though while reading all of this extensive praise a sound escaped from between my teeth, which he received with a gratified smile. When I stopped flipping through the papers, I told him that I didn’t understand criticism and critics but they’d praised him a lot. He was content, pleased with what I’d said. It seemed to me that his body relaxed a little. He wanted me to know that he wasn’t merely a person who couldn’t control his body and who was practically keeling over in front of me.
Finished with the papers and books, he started reminiscing about when we were friends, the days back when we were young men. He had more memories than I did—and I doubted if some of them had even happened. Perhaps they were his own inventions. In his n
arratives, he was the hero of the story and I was merely his sidekick.
He narrated to me—or rather to his wife—the story of the cemetery guard who would have kicked us out, had he not resisted. I knew nothing about this story. Nor the one in which we were confronted by four men while going down to the river. That time, it seems, he outwitted them and we escaped. These stories had me at a loss. But when he started in on the tale of his imaginary adventures with the curate’s daughter, my bewilderment disappeared. I realized that Adil Uliyyan was the very same liar I once had known.
Beirut Noir Page 20
