Beirut Noir

by Iman Humaydan

  The cold was severe; she closed the window. What should she prepare for dinner? The best thing to do would be to call Farid and ask him. After a bit. Nothing here called for hurrying. She found her habit of perpetual hurrying absurd. She went into the bedroom: books filled the shelves; some of them had yellowed pages, some emitted an old vanilla scent. What would be the fate of her books? Soon nothing would connect her to this world, which she built or destroyed, brick by brick. She opened the cupboard: her own clothes and some of her mother’s. In the corner, a navy-blue suit of her father’s that she thought he’d been buried in, believing that he’d only owned one. And navy blue was indeed what he’d been shrouded in. She drew it close and inhaled; it still carried his scent. How did her mother forget to get rid of it, especially since she always said, “The clothes of the dead should never be mixed with the clothes of the living”? She saw him in her sleep. She knew in her dream that he’d passed on, so she wanted to ask him about his new residence. She was sitting near him in the backseat of his car; for the first time he wasn’t the driver. She was planning to ask him about . . . he didn’t even once turn to look at her. He was morose and angry, knowing that she’d ask him about his death. He merely waved his hands at her nervously, saying, “You’re still rushing around.” He didn’t utter the word that he usually used: frantic.

  * * *

  Right now, though, she wasn’t “rushing around,” but lifeless.

  During her drive down to the seaside Corniche with Hyam, she started telling her friend to hurry, with Hyam imploring her to stay with her a little longer.

  “I wanted to call you yesterday, but I decided not to. I didn’t want to bother you. Lamia . . . you’ve seemed preoccupied for a while.”

  “I’m trying to change my lifestyle. It’s the second time that Farid’s come to Lebanon. I don’t want to engage in any more stupidity.”

  “Rest assured, there can’t be any greater stupidity than what you were doing back when we first met! If you’d killed someone . . .”

  She was surprised by the way Hyam was speaking to her. Why all this hostility?

  “Hyam . . . are you all right?”

  “No—and I wanted to tell you about my new resolution to put an end to all stupid things.”

  “Did you fight with Nazih again?”

  “No one deserves me. Do you remember that day when we were preparing food and he refused to help us? How could he just sit there all surly and superior, refusing to be with us?”

  “Perhaps he wasn’t feeling well or was tired . . .”

  “None of us feel well; we’re all tired . . . There’s something else there . . . I’m thinking about divorce.”

  “Funny, when I’m thinking about marriage.”

  “It hurts me to leave him, I’m afraid of him faltering . . . What keeps me there is his weakness. When he gets stronger, I’ll give up on him. Later, when he’s doing better, I’ll leave him right away, with no regrets.”

  “Really nice. You help him to get stronger and he gets stronger for you, then you leave him?”

  “I can’t leave him when he’s in this condition. My whole life is just a postponement of divorce.”

  “What if he stays the way he is?”

  “I don’t know. This is what confuses me. Perhaps the only solution is that we live apart, and through this I’ll find some kind of space that can make me love him more.”

  “My God, I’m lost . . . You’ve lost me in all these twists and turns!”

  “Sorry.”

  “For what?”

  “That I’ve confused you along with myself . . . I can’t bear to either separate from him or stay with him.”

  “Would you consider separating, at least for a little while?”

  “The thought haunts me. I don’t know if he would agree.”

  “What do you say we finish this conversation tomorrow?”

  Lamia reminded her friend that she’d invited Farid to dinner and needed to get home soon. Hyam turned to her, exploring her face with a piercing look.

  “Is this serious with Faird? Are you sure? This quickly? Don’t you want to wait a little?”

  “I want change; I can’t keep vacillating . . . You always criticize me for how my life has stagnated. In the best of times, you look down on my patience on the one hand, and on the other, my impulsivity. Why have you changed your mind all of a sudden?”

  “I don’t know, perhaps because I’m preparing for an imminent divorce.”

  * * *

  Lamia opened her locked desk drawer. She kept it locked to ensure that her mother wouldn’t pry. It was funny because the one day she forgot to lock it, she noticed in her mother’s mocking smile that she’d gone through it. Her mother waited more than a year to ask her about the pictures of the man she’d found in the drawer.

  She answered, “Salma took these photos when shooting one of her films in school.”

  “So why are you in most of them?”

  “Because Salma wanted me to be the star.”

  “Yes, she’s right, you were so beautiful.”

  “Every monkey is a gazelle in its mother’s eyes!”

  “So what is it that I’m always hearing about the reasons you haven’t gotten married?”

  “And now we’ve gone back to the same old song.”

  “But you’re my only daughter . . . I want to celebrate your wedding with you. All of your girlfriends have married and had children. What’s your story? Fine . . . That letter signed by your old high school friend, saying, May God keep this bitter drink far from us . . . What does that mean? What drink? You know . . . it’s the war’s fault; it meant that I couldn’t protect you. I was forced to stay in the mountains with your siblings. And you lived with your crazy girlfriends. All of the neighbors used to tell me, Umm Joseph, these girls are raising hell in the neighborhood. Your whole life I couldn’t learn anything about you or from you. Sometimes I’d be thinking, Is this my daughter? The one who I gave birth to? . . . Or not?”

  Her mother had stopped asking these questions a long time ago. Clearly, she’d lost hope.

  Perhaps the only good thing for her in this war was the freedom of living far from her parents. The constant cutting of the phone lines was a ready-made excuse to justify many things. She, Salma, and Hyam moved from one car to another around Beirut, undeterred by shelling and checkpoints, without any impediments. Salma would deal with falling shells as if they were fake—simply there as a backdrop to allow her to photograph the expanse of the entire city. She didn’t believe it possible that she could be killed or injured. She brooked no fear. If she sensed any fear in you, she would give you a look that would chill the blood in your veins.

  * * *

  Back then, Lamia had grabbed the photos from Philippe, the “hero” of the film—whether cynically or jokingly, it doesn’t matter. As usual, he threw himself on her bed, eyeing her. Then he said to her out of the blue that he never stays with any woman for more than two years. Two years in the best of cases. She didn’t reply.

  He did what he said he would. He didn’t stay with her even one month beyond the two years. When she added up the period of time between when they met and their breakup, the precision of his calculations amazed her. Those beams of the setting sun started to dim, carrying her days on their wings. Hyam came over to comfort Lamia and Salma picked up her letters to deliver them to Philippe by hand or send them by post (she learned only afterward that Salma would actually throw them in the trash can). That summer, she didn’t change out of her winter clothes, nor did she change her winter bedclothes. Beirut’s fiery summer heat, with its sun and bombs, couldn’t warm the cold inside of her. Nothing protected her in the barren field that was her bedroom except her dressing gown and her covers. If it weren’t for the war, her winter couldn’t have gone on for so long and she would have enjoyed her love that ended before it even began.

  Other forgotten memories surfaced from her “secret” stash of photos. They showed the blondness of Philippe’s s
tubbly beard, contrasting with his black hair and eyebrows and the shadows of his thick eyelashes. She recalled passing her hand over the freckles on his lower lip slanting down toward the fluff of his beard, the spot she touched stinging her own face. She drew back, and he grabbed her by the hand and threw her on the ground of the cement rooftop. There were stars above her eyes, glittering in a small pool of rainwater. She remembered him sitting on the sofa beside her, snatching pieces of fig from the plate in front of him, peeling them and scraping off the bits stuck on his fingers with his teeth. He seemed far away when he was united with her body (she was aware that after he got up, she’d put the same clothes back on that she’d worn earlier to greet him in, preparing for the moments of their encounter one by one, like someone replaying a scene in a film, and trying as much as possible to simulate his confident, slow caresses sliding from her legs up to her shoulders).

  * * *

  Philippe put his hand on her freezing shoulders. He liked to touch them; that’s what he told her.

  “Will you put your hand on my shoulders next autumn, once you’ve gone? Will you feel pleasure when it’s cold?”

  He encouraged her not to think about this.

  “But why? Does this have to happen? Isn’t it up to us?”

  “What do you want me to say? No matter what I say, you are going to be sad . . . If you’d only met someone else . . .”

  “Could you stop offering condolences? I know I’m the only one here mourning our relationship.”

  “Perhaps this misery comes from those dark clouds. Haven’t you noticed how thick they are? How could you expect me to have hope?”

  Everything that he said bothered her. She didn’t know what to do when faced with his complaining and infectious despair. In another picture, he was sticking his tongue out at her, a pink tongue folded in thirds.

  “What do you want, a happy end?”

  She stuck her tongue out at him now. “I just want some kind of end.”

  * * *

  The pizza that she’d insisted on preparing for Philippe that hot spring day had a taste she’d never forget. She was half-sleeping, half-awake, so the ring of the phone surprised her. Even today, she still remembers his number because of the frequency with which she’d dialed it on the old black phone, turning her finger again and again so that it hurt and she had to switch to dialing with a pen instead. Perhaps the broken telephone lines ignited their love rather than impeded it.

  She’d promised Philippe that she’d make a pizza for him. She left her house, went down to the street, leaving the Sayyidah neighborhood in Sin el Fil, taking the shortcut to Mar Elias. A small truck was stopped at the intersection, loaded with large cylinders of gas that looked exactly like the one she saw just before the explosion that destroyed most of the neighborhood. Afraid, she glanced away and didn’t head down that street. Before turning on her heels, she looked back once more: a year had passed and the specter of death was still looming over this stricken neighborhood. She took another road, passing in front of the church to reach Ghazal Street. She was crossing the muddy wasteland when shelling started raining down on the area. No doubt it would be described as a new “security setback.” She retraced her path along the sidewalk to her house at full speed.

  She prepared the dough while hoping that the madness would calm down so that one of the grocers would feel secure enough to open his shop. She was also worried about her two girlfriends who lived with her. Salma finally returned home, looking flustered. She’d continued studying on the West Side despite the threat of death hanging over her at every checkpoint when she traveled between the two Beiruts.

  “Why are you so pale? What happened?”

  She paused to collect herself, then said, “Three armed men stopped me and asked me my name. They told me, Walk with us, while pointing their machine guns at my stomach. Then they made me get into a small car. It was the first time I felt afraid, mostly because they were looking right at my chest and I wasn’t wearing a bra.”

  “Oh my God, you and your bra!” Nazih said, trying to lighten the mood.

  “As soon as I got in the car, I buttoned up my blouse and covered the book I was carrying with my arm. The men were morose. I asked them why they were kidnapping me, as I have nothing to do with politics. What do you want from a poor girl like me? They answered all together, Poor girl . . . ? I said, Yes, really . . . poor girl! Every day forced to go through checkpoints just to pursue my studies. They asked me, Why don’t you go to university on the East Side? I answered them, Because I want to know the real Beirut, the diverse Beirut. On the East Side there’s only one party and one sect. They didn’t say a word. I felt cramped and unhappy in this small car, especially with the machine gun thrust into my waist. I had a collection of Muhammad Abdullah’s poetry with me which I began reciting aloud. They laughed but at least moved the machine gun away from me. Then the car stopped in front of the party’s headquarters. At that moment, I finally lost my mind and told them, You and everyone else! The whole world’s at war, even my parents and family, so I became a member of your party—and then you arrest me! Really? I was expecting a fighter from the other party to plunge a machine gun into my belly . . .

  “I unbuttoned my blouse then because I was no longer afraid. They told me, This news just reached us: a Maronite girl from the East Side is going to the Corniche at Raouché and learning from the fighters there how to make TNT and put it into jerricans. Then I told them that they should thank me for my work, so that I could fight against Israel. By the way, you all don’t fight against it as you should be. One of them said to me falteringly, We believed you were a spy! I answered, Could a spy to work in the light of day on the Corniche in sight of everyone? Afterward, he started to respond to the arguments I’d made, in which I’d intended to exaggerate, by proposing that I work as a spy for them, bringing them news of the other party. So I told them, Let me go, I won’t be anyone’s spy, not even Lenin’s himself. Then I got out, slamming the car door behind me.”

  “And Hyam, why hasn’t she come back yet? Have you heard from her?”

  “I saw her in the café at the university and she told me she would stay at Nazih’s place.”

  “What a day! I went out to the shops and everything was closed.”

  “Your problem is simple to solve. It seems like the shelling is dying down. Let’s step out to buy what you need and celebrate your special guest.”

  This is Salma’s favorite line. She works hard to make the shelling die down. That time the Russian Grad missiles all but destroyed the entire neighborhood, the balconies of the building facing ours fell off and she said, “Don’t worry, it’s far away.”

  * * *

  Lamia missed Salma so much since she’d moved to Sydney. In any case, one of the good things about the trip she has planned with Farid is that she’ll get to see Salma, her friend for life. Lamia didn’t know why, but when thinking about Salma, she would remember her feet more than any other feature: her childlike feet clambering through fields and up trees, her two legs plowing through streets, wandering sidewalks, penetrating alleys, going up stairs, climbing up dirt berms as though they were small hills. Her feet were balanced, like a boat between the shores of a city totally given over to its madness; they rose up tearing apart roads and checkpoints, and they pumped blood through its severed arteries. Her old feet were there on the asphalt, deaf to everything that might startle the ear and heart, pursuing the traces of the one she loved so as to touch his shadow. It was as if this young woman was soaring in an earthly flight that could never weaken. But once her feet suddenly betrayed her in the middle of the street, forsaking her, making her unable to take even a single step ahead. That time, she and Hyam were forced to pick Salma up and put her in the car as though she were actually paralyzed. She started screaming, saying that she didn’t want to go home and that she couldn’t bear to see her husband all devoted to his pigeons, or escaping into the garage, claiming to be absorbed in his drawing while all he was doing was smokin
g and drinking beer.

  “He even pushed me to argue with our next-door neighbor, saying that she was a lying, gossiping woman, after she told me that she saw him going into my house with that whore of a woman during the summer holiday. If only I hadn’t listened to what he said and fought with the neighbor, I would’ve been able to find out more details.”

  “More than what you know? What’s the point? Then you’d be destroyed!”

  “And let this destroy me? I will destroy his comfort and that whore’s as well . . .”

  She declared with total impudence that before marriage she’d wanted to establish a relationship with a man with experience.

  “And your husband, what about him . . . ?”

  “As usual, he told me that jealousy would blind my heart. Before marriage, we’d agreed on an open relationship with no conditions. But what kind of free love can you have with kids? Lamia, please rub my knees for me, I can no longer feel them . . . And my head hurts, give me a scarf to wrap around it . . . Why doesn’t he love me anymore?”

  “Haven’t you had enough of this question? Salma, be as strong as you always have been. You’ve survived worse.”

  “This man is displacing me in my own house, he’s made me unable to stand up. They imagine me, Salma, to be debilitated and disjointed, only able to ask one question.” She lowered her aching head like a woman bereaved, then added, “But why doesn’t he still love me? Does that trivial woman understand love better than I do? She’s certainly no Claudia Cardinale . . . I’ve brought women who are much more beautiful than her to my husband so he could film their bodies.”