Beirut Noir

by Iman Humaydan

  Today I see many women covering their heads like my grandmother did, but I don’t smell her scent on them when they pass me. I don’t smell the scent of love that used to waft from my grandmother’s face. I smell a scent of hatred.

  Her face was as open as her heart and the scent of her house was a boundless scent of serenity. I didn’t know the secret in the beginning, or its explanations weren’t clear to me. Now I realize that it was the scent of eighty years in the house. A delicious scent that radiated from her face and the yellow calicotome flowers in her hands. The scent of her generous eyes. I still know that scent even now.

  The scent is a secret.

  The secret is that I smelled the scent of a woman one day, crossing Hamra Street. More than two years had elapsed since my grandmother had passed away, and for a flash of a second I thought she was still alive.

  I followed the scent and I followed the woman. She grew afraid and quickened her footsteps. I walked faster too but I still couldn’t glimpse her face. Her scent filled the street. I kept getting closer to her, she was rushing and I was rushing, then she started to run. I forgot everything and ran after her, but then she disappeared among the passersby. Her scent remained in the street though. I was really sad because I’d lost her. When I told my friend about it, she advised me to visit the doctor right away. Then I was even sadder, because she didn’t understand me.

  I was even sadder yet when I left the street in the heavy rain. The storm twisted around Beirut and made the scent of trash rise in the street. The trash scent was strong in the evenings, when my friends and I would careen all around the city in a car, laughing. The refuse of one street is different from that of every other street. My friend said that nature was also found in the scent of garbage. The scent in this street seemed profound. The wind stirred up leftover bits of food into the air, then we moved to another street where groups of people who are always fighting each other live.

  My friend observed, “These two groups of people are only united by the scent of garbage.” When we crossed into a posher area, he said, “This is the scent of bourgeois trash.” We laughed until we almost died . . . either of laughter or of that scent.

  I felt sick when I saw the mounds of rubbish rising up out of pools of water and I crossed the street. It didn’t feel like morning. The morning meant that a new opportunity—washed and clean—would augur another day.

  The morning was dead in my eyes.

  The street wasn’t how I once knew it. For a long time now, the morning has been overshadowed.

  * * *

  Years ago, I used to sit in the Wimpy coffee shop in Hamra in the morning and look out the window at the people on the street. I felt that Beirut was waking up from its slumber little by little, movement crept along little by little, and noise crawled by little by little. The sight of the workers was beautiful, when they were rushing to their jobs. Now there aren’t any workers left in the city, nor does the city wake up to the sound of their shoes. Armed fighters have taken over everything. Workers are now clothing vendors or fighters on the many front lines. Whenever more battle lines are drawn, more workers disappear. The city wakes up today without mornings to indicate the start of work. At least the scent of morning is no longer present, so people don’t wash the traces of the day before off their faces; they continue to live yesterday.

  * * *

  I don’t like yesterday.

  Yesterday’s scent was on my body, on Beirut’s body, and the scent of the news of the crime against that woman was in my chest. The scent of people’s eyes resembled each other, though the eyes of faces were alone and sad and closed like those iron gates placed in front of the doors of houses.

  People feel that they are isolated from one other. Bodies move. As if they are beings with no relationship to each other, though they say that people group into different types of clusters. I don’t believe this, and faced with this feeling I almost hope that my eyes will be dead.

  But the scent of death emanating from the passersby unites them. Before, the street used to take on the scent of people along with the scent of the buildings.

  I used to walk on the sidewalk, even though there wasn’t really a sidewalk anymore. Just as inhabitants of the houses in Beirut changed, the sidewalks changed. The houses in the city disappeared and the sidewalks disappeared. The sound of shoes on the sidewalk couldn’t be heard anymore, only the sound of selling. Every vendor takes a share of the sidewalk, sitting there with his wares. Clothes hang on Beirut’s sidewalks and walls and from balconies. It seemed to me that the city had changed a lot, or perhaps had disappeared. They say that time is more powerful than anything else. Things change but people only yearn for the past. They only believe their memory.

  The past is the origin and the origins are lost.

  * * *

  A sense of loss pervaded everything, and I almost got lost. Where was I going? I forgot that I am also a worker. The sound of my shoes didn’t rise up anymore, only the voice of a taxi driver. He screamed at me and I walked over to him. I approached the car as if I wanted to flee from my exhausted head, the exhausting street, and the exhausting city—the closed faces like the locked iron gates in front of the houses.

  For a long time, the doors to houses weren’t locked. I remember that our neighbor didn’t lock her house out of embarrassment, so it wouldn’t seem like she was in a conflict with my mother. My mother also used to do that. The two houses were always open except when there was a fight between the two families. Now all doors are locked. Perhaps anger blinds people’s hearts, or perhaps fear. But the city is locked up on itself, people are locked up on themselves, each sect on itself, each face on its features.

  Metal doors are heavy. I shut the metal door to the car, sliding into the backseat.

  I told the driver, “Good morning.”

  He smiled, saying, “Good morning.”

  After the taxi had driven for a while, a woman got in. Her body was wrapped up in gray and her face was covered in a gray cloth hung around her ears on both sides. She said loudly, “Salaamu alaykum.” The driver answered, “Salaamu alaykum.” Then he glanced at me in the rearview mirror, reminding me that I hadn’t said Salaamu alaykum. He suddenly got mad at me, his face turning angry. “Where’s the salaam, the peace?”

  “Perhaps it won’t come to us,” the woman said. I didn’t think anything more of it then. I was only thinking about getting to the place where the crime had occurred, and that the woman sitting next to me didn’t have a scent like my grandmother’s.

  “Where’s the salaam from?”

  I tried to press myself harder against the door on my side of the car.

  The driver almost crashed into the beggar who always stands in the middle of the street. This man has a strange shape. He looks as if he’s balancing precariously on a tightrope with one foot.

  One of his legs was longer than the other. One eye higher than the other, one hand longer than the other, and the right side of his mouth was raised up higher than the left. He seemed blinded by fear. He was shaking violently. Sometimes when he approaches the car with his hand outstretched to take money he looks like he might topple over. He can’t balance. He is a lump of a ruin, or a lump of a little war of destruction. Again and again I’m afraid that I’ll hit him with my car and he will fall on the ground dead. His appearance frightens me so I always try to change my route home so I won’t crash into him.

  I used to feel that I hated him. He made me nervous whenever I saw him. I don’t know why I grew afraid every time I glimpsed this young man.

  For a split second I almost screamed at the driver—I thought he was going to hit him—but I quickly put my hand over my mouth.

  What are you thinking, girl? I was really afraid of this.

  I rested on the metal car door and felt like crying. But I was too embarrassed to cry there in the car. They wouldn’t understand and would ask me what was wrong. How could I say that I really want the driver to kill this beggar who I’m afraid of? In the bes
t-case scenario, they would call me insane. Perhaps they would say, She’s right. For sure, I’m more afraid of what their answer would be.

  I thought of going to the doctor and telling him about this. But if he diagnosed me as abnormal, I wouldn’t be able to explain it to him. Killing scares me, and even the idea of killing terrifies me. My eyes overflowed with tears, I almost wept aloud.

  Another male passenger looked over and I turned my head away. Then I really did cry and everyone in the car started staring at me. My crying grew much louder.

  * * *

  My grandmother used to say that crying doesn’t bring sadness, but rather washes your heart, that crying is relief.

  Why did I want to kill that shaky, scary man? Perhaps out of weakness—because everyone else is killing. People who aren’t killing in the city don’t feel their own existence. For a moment I sensed the secret of my hatred for that man. It was like looking at him in a mirror: I observed people in the road, they all looked like him. The walls of the city, the roads, and the country and its economy—everything was him. He was a summary of what’s inside all of us.

  All of us resemble him inside. The country is this man. So I’m scared of him. I am scared of the truth. The ugly truth. I don’t like it. We all shake like him and the earth beneath our feet shakes like him too.

  Again and again, I’ve changed my route so I won’t run into him, but it’s in vain. Whenever I go out on the street I see him there. Even though he can barely walk, you see him wherever you go. So I avoid looking at him, and when I’m driving I close my window whenever he approaches. I tremble when he knocks on the glass with his fingers, and the moments when I stop in traffic feel like an eternity.

  * * *

  My fingers had pins and needles, as if my blood couldn’t reach them, as if all the blood was pooled in my head. I smelled the scent of blood in the taxi. I looked around me but didn’t find any trace of it. The scent of blood increased when the driver turned on the radio.

  I heard the report about the woman again. The broadcast said that she was found murdered on the steps of a building, her features unidentifiable, and there were bullet holes in her belly and neck.

  From the backseat of the taxi I glimpsed my reflection in the rearview mirror. My features seemed indistinguishable. I wound my fingers around each other and crossed my legs because I had to go to the bathroom; whenever I’m scared I have to go to the bathroom. I fell silent. In the beginning the news didn’t arouse anyone’s curiosity.

  The woman was talking about how expensive things are; she said, “Plastic flip-flops cost fifteen lira!”

  Someone else sitting in the car interrupted her, saying, “Now it’s the women’s turn. They’ve finished everything else and now they’ve started in on the women.”

  Silence reigned. Then another man’s voice followed: “Good man, women are like cats, they have nine lives, nothing harms them. So many men have died, there are lots of women in the country. However many are lost, there will still be more women than men.”

  The woman who was sitting in the backseat with us said, “Every time a woman is killed, there is a good reason behind her death. God punishes she who sins. The fate of the sinner is death.”

  “Yes indeed,” they all replied.

  I remained silent and backed farther into the corner.

  * * *

  I remembered my friend’s story. She told me that when she was a girl, a man entered their house asking for her father’s protection. This man had killed his mentally challenged sister. Her family had sent her to someone’s house to work there. The owner of the house assaulted her. When her belly grew big, without her knowing why, her brother shot her and took refuge in my friend’s father’s house, asking for his protection. My friend was upset when she told me about this, saying, “What makes me sad is that my mother was praising the guy, God bless your hands, you noble man!”

  For a moment, I thought that the news of the woman on the radio was the same person who my friend had told me about. I had almost forgotten about that incident from so many years ago. But I remembered that for the woman who was found killed, there was no mention of an investigation into a possible rape or assault. They found not a baby, but bullets in her belly.

  But where did they find these women to kill? Though the man said that there were so many women in the country, they aren’t here anymore.

  My friend says they are floating apparitions, resembling gray tents from head to toe. My grandmother used to tell me that women haven’t been present since the time of her grandfather’s grandfather who killed her in infancy because he didn’t want anyone to be disgraced like that woman.

  I believed my grandmother was telling me a bedtime story on that distant day. In my dreams I saw the neighbors’ daughter entering a white room where I lay stretched out on a bed. The neighbors’ daughter was wearing a beautiful long white dress as if she were a bride. I only knew her from having seen her on the balcony. In the dream, she gave me a sad look, then waved her hand. She left through the door and locked it behind her. With this sound of the door closing, I woke up to gunfire. I got up quickly and went to the balcony. I saw the girl’s corpse lying out in front of her house, the women and men of the street gathering around her. Her brother had shot her. They said that she was having a relationship with someone, her brother saw her with him. His mother’s voice rang out through the street: “Run away, get out of here before the police come!”

  That day I told my mother about the dream. She said that the white dress symbolizes death. “My daughter, your dream frightens me.”

  The words of the woman in the car and her enthusiasm about the crime against the dead woman reminded me of that girl’s mother’s voice. For an instant, I thought that she was her mother, especially when the broadcast said that the woman was wearing a white dress.

  * * *

  My grandmother says that age is a lie. The coming days are an echo of the past and its shadow.

  The past is truth and the truth is the infant girl murdered at birth centuries ago. But I don’t believe the news. Is it possible that the scent of blood can remain on the body for centuries?

  The scent of my body has remained for centuries.

  * * *

  The scent of my body rose and filled the car. The people in it started coughing. I coughed too, and the dust of my breath reached the driver’s mirror. He pulled his head back and turned toward me in anger.

  I knew he couldn’t understand my features. They had lived through centuries. Today they have the city’s scent. Everyone coughed again. I coughed too, and my heart stopped beating before I reached the place where the incident happened. My body had become unidentifiable.

  Everyone was scared and filled with shame. They started exchanging glances with each other. When we got to the scene of the crime, the man sitting next to me opened the door and threw me out on the ground. The car took off quickly.

  I stretched out on the ground, and before closing my eyes and passing out, I realized that I was the woman who was found murdered. My grandmother’s voice was ringing in my ears and my scent covered the whole place.

  The scent of the city covered my outstretched body.

  Originally written in Arabic.

  Sails on the Sidewalk

  by MARIE TAWK

  Sin el Fil

  She went up the stairs, careful as usual not to stumble on the broken steps. It’s a long walk up to the sixth floor. She put the bags she was carrying on the landing to rest a little. She leaned against the edge of the big wrought-iron window that’s cracked in more than one place. Electricity lines hung suspended and sagging between the buildings. A drab flock of pigeons flew near the cypress tree that soared up above the buildings. Desiccation had begun to grip it from the top and some of its branches were dead. Will this affect all of its branches or will it endure in the same condition it has been in for the past few years? Why had she never noticed this before? She felt a sudden fatigue; she had to hurry up and prepare dinner.r />
  It was a worthy occasion. She was going to talk to Farid about everything. (She liked to pronounce his new name, not what he called himself as a child but what he did now after coming back from Australia: Freddy. This was nicer, it made her feel that he’d become a new person.) She was going to talk to him about their life together, and she would try to come closer to his world because the few memories that she’s preserved of him have become cloudy. All that she can recall is his beaming smile, which bewitched all the young women, and his huge, round, black eyes that added magic to it. She also remembered how he came back happy after watching a scary film in which the heroine, who he said resembled her, had been hanged. She asked him why he was happy about her death projected onto the big-screen heroine—did he hate her that much? He didn’t reply. She also didn’t forget his lightning-quick visit through Beirut, his insistence on seeing her, and how she couldn’t be bothered. She was completely absorbed in another world, a severely blind one. She then learned that he’d married a foreign woman soon after he’d come back, and they’d divorced four years later.

  She opened the door. She headed into the kitchen to put the bags on the counter, then went back into the living room. White sheets covered the sofas, like it was wartime or summer vacation. After her father died, her siblings emigrated and her mother moved to the mountains, so the house was left to her free-ranging loneliness. She threw herself on the sofa. She felt dizzy, so she got up to open the window and take in a bit of air.

  She wouldn’t ever again hear her father cough as he walks up the stairs. She was so used to hearing it, she couldn’t have known that this cough would become the portent of nothingness. She wouldn’t be anxious anymore because her father didn’t answer the phone all night long. She’d nap awhile then wake up a little panicked, dialing the number again and waiting for him to answer. In the morning, he would answer her call with his shaky voice, accompanied by a strangulated cough, saying that he’d gone to sleep early and didn’t hear the telephone ring. She later considered these the first signs of his imminent death, and also fully recalled the nerve-wracking waiting for Philippe—her ex-sweetheart—to respond at the other end of the line.