She walked tensely and hastily. The walk of a harassed woman. A woman distressed by the persistent resurfacing of her past suddenly reaching into the present. She had no space left in her heart for the nagging guilt triggered by Allen’s sad expression. Her blunt rejection of his kindness was the best she could manage. She needed to empty her heart totally in order to be able to survive. She had already once previously gathered all the cruelty she could muster in order to dump the voice that had reappeared in her life today. She had somehow believed that the man whose desperate voice she’d heard on the phone was locked away in the city she had abandoned, relegated to an epoch that was past and gone.
For the first time since moving into her Parisian flat she walked through the familiar streets of her quartier oblivious to the colours and joys of the busy vegetable market, insensitive to the temptations of its shop windows, and unaware of an invigorating breeze announcing an early spring. She did not stop at her café-bistrot for the sweet, lazy ritual of sipping an espresso while watching the passers-by. She could not bear the idea of staying still. She needed to keep on moving. Walking stubbornly ahead. Trying to stop her thoughts from drifting back to the place where his voice had come from, to the amputated memories of a torn city that had once been hers.
Beirut exhaled a fragrance of damp earth. A sweet, teasing scent filled her nostrils. A triumphant sun had cleared the grey thickness from the sky, appeasing its anger with an offering of blue. The fear of death that had emptied the streets and left them grieving seemed to have faded away as if by a miracle. Her body felt powerful and she stepped forward cheerfully. The Palestinian camp of Sabra was waking into life. A smell of dark tea emanated from precarious shacks, seeping through the hesitant openings of their narrow doorways. Children rushed impetuously in the narrow alleys, and their mothers poured water onto concrete floors and then swept it out of their clustering homes with a generous thrust. The camp, usually so noisy and busy, was still testing the vulnerable silence that follows the rage and roar of combat. Inside the medical centre where she was heading, the walls were an immaculate white, and voices were hushed. But the discreet manners of the staff were not sufficient to cushion their patients from the world outside. How could anyone hope to separate the ‘inside’ from the ‘outside’ in a place where the roof was made of corrugated tin and the front door opened immediately onto the clamour of the alley and the invading dust of its unpaved earth? She wondered this every time she stepped into the ‘hospital’, as the people of the camp liked to call it. She was working here, helping to classify the medicines on the shelves and translating their instructions into Arabic. She had been coming here once a week since the beginning of the war, and it was here for the first time that her involvement with the Leftist movement had felt meaningful and concrete. Here, among the angry complaints and the patient resignation of the wounded, next to a chaotic group of women carrying sick children and attempting to pacify the healthy ones they had brought with them, she realised the extent of her abhorrence of her own class – the middle class – with its paranoid fear of these people and their lack of compassion for the ‘unhygienic camps’ into which none of them had ever set foot.
She looked alien in the camp, and this bothered her. The way she dressed was out of tune with the long, ample skirts worn by the camp’s women, or the headscarves that modestly covered their hair. She could never bring herself to play at looking ‘genuine’, exchanging her jeans for a long dress just before entering the camp to fulfil her militant duties, as some of her female comrades did. She would have thought this theatrical, and she had no time for what she regarded as ‘populist hypocrisy’. She walked through the muddy alleys with the slightly hurried pace of an apparently confident woman.
The air of agitation at the medical centre was explained by the presence of two open-top Jeeps squeezed into the alley next door. She had to advance sideways in order to reach the door and step inside. He stopped speaking and his eyes moved towards the door where she was standing. The two nurses and the doctor were sitting in front of him and she could hardly see them. There was a thicket of armed men standing around in the reception area, drastically reducing its size, and thickening the air with a fug of Marlboro cigarettes. A few awkward seconds passed, heavy with embarrassing silence, before the doctor introduced her and invited her to sit down.
Abu Firas was not as tall as she had imagined. He had been much talked of since the war began. She avoided looking at him, for fear of betraying her inner agitation and her intense curiosity. He had a reputation as a tough leader, a dangerous warrior and a secretive manipulator. She knew he was watching her while he questioned the medical staff about their needs and the problems the clinic was facing in those troubled times. The men went on drawing deeply on their cigarettes, adjusting the Kalashnikovs on their shoulders and listening silently with the deep concentration of chain-smokers. He, for his part, held his cigarette between his thumb and index finger – a nervous, bony hand, from which a deep heat seemed to emanate.
She was incapable of following the conversation, and was powerless to stop herself staring at his hands, with their angular, forceful impact. The haze that enveloped the smoky room had blurred her vision and her sense of reality. She was taken by surprise when she realised that he was already saying goodbye and preparing to leave, followed by his fighters and guards who were now vigorous and alert. When she could no longer hear the squealing tyres of the departing cars, she moved towards the shelves that she had come to organize. Her movements and her thoughts were slower than she intended; the vision of his dark, penetrating eyes and the movement of his warm, agile hands lingered persistently in her mind’s eye. It suddenly occurred to her that, unlike most Arab men, he had no moustache. This fact amused her. She caught herself smiling. An hour or so later, with the medicines on the shelf still far from organized, she heard a vehicle screech to a halt in the alley outside the clinic. One of Abu Firas’s bodyguards stepped abruptly into the room, sucking on his Marlboro and utterly unimpressed by the sign on the door announcing ‘Please knock before entering’.
‘Abu Firas asked me to take you to his office. There’s something urgent that he needs to discuss with you. I will drive you there.’
She knew that she should have shown hesitation, or maybe said something about needing to finish her work, but she was incapable of resisting her desire to follow him. She picked up the navy-blue jacket that she wore while about her militant duties, but as she put it on she wished that she had not tried so hard to look shapeless and unkempt.
She found it hard to recall how she had come into his office or how she had climbed the stairs of the building where the bodyguard had taken her. She wasn’t really listening to Abu Firas’s long and serious-sounding speech about how much the revolution needed people like her. His phrases didn’t seem to be made of words. Their messages were lost in her desire to be closer to his hands, to be warmed by the heat that emanated from their tense movements. She was pleasantly taken aback when he told his bodyguard that he no longer needed him. The voice of the bodyguard saying goodbye sounded curiously incorporeal. She heard the sound of the door closing, and unknowingly she moved towards those hands and towards him.
This was the beginning of a passion that was immersed in war and danger, fired by its secrecy and its proximity to death and destruction. She had plunged into an adventure of perilous abnormality, knowing its dangers but doing nothing to resist them.
She had reached the Place du Châtelet, having walked down Boulevard St Michel, without having realised it. The openness of the pedestrianized square and its lively comings and goings irritated her and drew her back into the present. Why was she walking so fast … behaving like a woman on the run … a fugitive? Beirut was far away. She had choices. She could step inside the Théâtre de la Ville, or walk back towards the bridge. She could abandon herself to the soft flow of the Seine and allow its comforting presence to calm her. She didn’t have to dash about like this. She could push back the memories
and assign a more recent starting-point to her personal history, perpetuating what she had achieved before the damned telephone call of that afternoon. What she had done in Beirut, and the way she had behaved there, was none of her responsibility. It had happened in the midst of a generalised dementia. Now she lived here, beside a great, glittering river, in a great and vivacious city, light years away from the morbidity that she had witnessed during that aberrant period of her life.
But those three rings of the phone had been enough to take all the serenity away from her, to bring back strange and unfathomable feelings of guilt, and an uncertainty that was now making her rush about on city pavements, faster than Paris was used to.
‘The responsibility is mine too. I was blinded by passion and lost my lucidity. I fooled myself that I was joining a revolution, one that would stop misery and injustice. But I used him. I used him to belong. To harvest energy from the fear of death that was spreading around. I suppressed the fear in my body beneath the warmth of his embrace. There was the night when I could not let go of his body and kept drawing him back into me with the rhythm of the shelling that was pounding relentlessly, violently shaking the building where we met in secret. I gladly repressed questions about the meaning of what was happening, about its contradiction with the ideals we had all started from. I kept moving and doing things instead of stopping and questioning. I lost any sense of normality and called on his body to take me deeper into the dizziness of the unknown …’
She must have been talking to herself. People were giving her embarrassed looks. She was speaking out loud as if to hear for herself what she had not been willing to tell anyone else. Allen’s discretion had been tactful, but she wished he had been more forceful, less respectful of the years before he met her. Maybe then she wouldn’t have ended up like a crazy woman talking to herself on the pavements of Paris. By now she was on the Rue du Rivoli, approaching the Louvre, and the streets were full of tourists. She felt more sympathetic towards them at that moment, now that she suddenly saw herself as a visitor in Paris rather than a person whose life had begun here, only a few months ago, at the gates of Orly airport.
She turned right at the Palais Royal and looked for a café where she could rest her feet and calm her anguished mind over an espresso. She needed to be in control. She knew that she could no longer escape the intrusion of her own story. She ordered a bottle of mineral water and a coffee, and felt an urge to smoke a cigarette, as if the act of smoking, which she had given up, might seal her decision to take a look backwards. She looked in her pocket and found an old electric bill and a Bic pen that was broken at one end. The waiter was tidying up for the end of his shift, and she settled the bill promptly, eager to be left alone with her thoughts and the blank space on the back of the electric bill.
Dear Abu Firas,
So it was you on the phone today! I apologize for having hung up on you. I could not face hearing your voice. Just as I am not able to face the woman that I was when I was near you. I know you suffered a lot when I disappeared. I can still see the despair in your eyes as you looked into my sudden coldness and my inexplicable metamorphosis during our last meeting. You were speechless. The woman who had longed for your caresses, whose desires seemed never satiated, was turning her back on you, refusing to grant even the hint of an explanation. This woman was at a loss with her own transformation and could not offer a justification that did not exist.
You see, when my brother was wounded, you insisted on coming to the hospital to be near me and help console my parents. But my brother’s wounds and the despair of my parents had thrust me back into my previous world, one in which the war and the tragic condition of those who suffered it, was as real as burning flesh. The shattered faces anxiously waiting in the hospital corridors stripped away the abstractness of the war. It was no longer possible to hear the war as an exaltation of detonating sounds, or see it as a constellation of strangely beautiful night-lit skies. Nor could it be justified by wishful thinking and self-gratifying beliefs. The slogans that we had advanced blew up in my face. My passion for you retracted from my body, leaving a dreadful aftertaste; my thoughts were troubled as if blurred by the ache of an instantaneous hangover. My brother’s pain suddenly exposed all the wounds I had chosen not to see in the months we had been together. The anguished faces of the wives, the friends and the relatives of those pain-tormented patients squeezed together in the crowded hospital corridors became unbearable witnesses to my own carelessness. You should not have come into those corridors, into the reality of my family. You should not have become real. We could only belong in abnormality; we were only real inside an actuality that was aberrant; we made love frantically and grew more passionate only because of it.
I have not forgotten my excitement on that night when I realised that one of your visitors was an international smuggler. He spoke of the leaders of the other camp, your ‘enemies’, with great familiarity. I tried to listen to the conversation through the closed door. I felt no need to judge this man then. You, on the other hand, didn’t want me mixing with him. I recall you telling me after he left: ‘The road to liberation cannot be pure and clean.’ You didn’t like him. I wanted to join you in the room with him but you wouldn’t allow me. My excitement was like that of a teenager meeting an actor from a film she has just seen. I had heard of these smugglers who had no friend and no cause and who traded with both sides, and I was curious to see one in the flesh. For me it was a game. Like entering a forbidden world. For you, it was a dirty business you had to go through, and one where you did not want me involved.
I left the country as soon as my brother’s life was out of danger. I never looked back. I started hating all those who held a weapon in the name of a cause. I grew intolerant of their rationalisations. I thought that by obliterating the past I could erase my own involvement. I would be able to say to myself, ‘I never held a weapon, I was just trying to help those whom my society was oppressing. I closed my eyes to the cruelties, the orgy of retaliation and reaction that spread around me.’ I didn’t want to look at the crimes that were being perpetrated by the men I was mixing with, some of whom are called martyrs today. I drowned my anguish in the thrills of lustful indulgence. I could not have explained this to you then, for I did not understand it myself at the time. I cultivated amnesia, because it was easier that way. I built a world with no past in it. But it took just one telephone call to prove how fragile and artificial my creation had been.
I was lucky I had the possibility of leaving. Many were stuck in the war and didn’t have the luxury of avoiding involvement in it. But the bliss of amnesia seems to be short-lived, and the desire to ignore my own responsibilities was a flimsy subterfuge against guilt. The most difficult thing for me to acknowledge is that I blinded myself deliberately for such a long time. It took the ripped and torn body of my brother to release me. What right do I have now to blame those who continued indulging in the abnormality of war?
I attempted a total transmutation. I had to move into a brand new setting, come to foreign lands and hear a different language before I could realise how terrible and absurd this whole thing had been. I needed to cross thousands of miles to see what it was like to live once again outside this orgy of violence and death, and to realise how terribly cruel our cruelty was.
By now she was writing over the bill itself. She hadn’t noticed the blue ink staining her fingers from the broken Bic. She knew she would never send the letter, but she needed to keep on writing. A new waiter was setting the tables around her for dinner. He gave her a quick smile and she wondered if it meant that he wanted her to move, or that he didn’t intend to disturb her. More lights were switched on in the café, and she looked outside. The cheerful luminosity of the sky had gone, plunging the day into a rosy-blue melancholy. A group of five or six teenagers made a boisterous entrance into the café. They were speaking loudly, boastfully, jostling with youthful energy. She glanced rapidly at her table before leaving, as if to be sure that no trace of her secret r
emained on its surface. She walked out slowly, embracing the rhythms of Paris as darkness settled. She began to head for home. She was happy to face the night. The road between the Palais Royal and her apartment in the Latin Quarter felt like a peaceful interlude, a serene pause between her troubled memories and a future that was vague.
Allen did not question her when she returned to the flat and plugged the phone back in. He did not even ask where she had been or how she was feeling. He was preparing dinner and flicking through a book he had brought with him. A hardback on Feyerabend’s theory of knowledge which he would tell her about enthusiastically over dinner. Would she have opened up to him if he had been more insistent? He noted teasingly that she had drunk more than her usual portion of their vin de table. His lovely English accent, with its tendency to stretch and tilt the ‘in’ in vin and open up the ‘a’ in table, was a pleasant reminder of their first encounter. His calm poise put her at ease, and having hastily cleared the table she settled in front of her desk. She was eager to wander back through her memories, and she wanted to write.
You too were a nicer man than the man the war turned you into. I could feel your sudden yearning for gentleness, and your need to confide in the woman who was making love to you. But the woman who I was then rejected all your efforts to humanize the relationship. That woman was indulging in a voluptuous alienation of her body from her senses and feelings. Nothing around me really made sense, and I did not want you to be real and human in the midst of all the confusion. The closeness of those combative males in whose circles you moved threw me into cycles of rejection and attraction that were only appeased by your embrace. Even then I loathed this excess of maleness that had taken hold of my city but I dismissed my feelings in the sheltering warmth of your hands. I escaped my fears by endlessly testing my vulnerability. I suppressed them by walking into dangers, and you kept being amazed at what you thought was my courage. I did not speak much to you. I only cared for the suffering of the others, all the others, of what I called ‘humanity’. Yet I denied the humanity of the man who was the closest to me, and whom I so often drew passionately inside me. My passion was just a symptom of the war. I could never explain this to you, and when I walked out of the war I erased your existence like those soldiers who prefer to leave their shame buried in the lands to which they have been sent to fight.
Leaving Beirut Page 2
