Leaving Beirut

by Ghoussoub, Mai;

  ‘That’s all he needs now, to start complaining of stomach aches and making my life even more of a misery,’ Fadwa had screamed, beside herself with anger.

  By now, Salem was actively looking forward to leaving this world, as a way of escaping Fadwa’s ministrations. I visited Leila the week before he died, and I still remember the way that his eyes seemed to show a new purpose. They showed a spark of life, for they were the eyes of a man who had made a decision. He would take away from Fadwa her means of hurting him. He died suddenly in his wheelchair, with no prior signs or warning.

  Fadwa was restless during the funeral. She had the look of precisely what she was – a person who would not let go. She was agitated, and seemed intent on prolonging the mourning rituals and directing the ceremonials.

  ‘True, the man was a big burden, but he might have lived a bit longer,’ she said. Her lips were taut. ‘I always did my best to look after him.’

  Fadwa did not outlive Salem by much. Her energies seemed to dwindle rapidly. Her bitterness had no focus, and without active revenge she had nothing else on which to feed. Revenge had become the whole substance of her life. As a result, the death of Salem left her with new feelings of betrayal. She had lived out of hatred, a hatred that she had nourished with his misery. Fadwa had never made space in her heart, or in her body, for any other source of life energy. When the end came, she died mumbling something about feeling a lump in her throat. It was the betrayal that she had never been able to swallow, and the revenge that she had never been able to exact.

  The Heroism of Umm Ali

  When Hayat told me that the famous Umm Ali was none other than Latifa, the little maid who used to live in their home, I found myself feeling confused and depressed. For me, Latifa would always be the frail, skinny little girl who used to have to stand on a stool in the big, damp kitchen in order to reach the sink where piles of dirty dishes and pans seemed to accumulate unendingly. Latifa had been nine years old when I started going to the dark stuffy flat where Hayat lived with her father, his mother, his second wife and her son. I used to go round after school to do my homework. Like all the little girls who worked as maids in Beirut, Latifa woke up before everybody else, and only went to sleep after the last of them had gone to bed. She was both the youngest and the smallest in the establishment, and she was there to clean, scrub and bear the brunt of the family’s anger, their whims and their insults. Hayat was the only one who ever expressed any measure of sympathy towards this little girl, this taken-for-granted slave in this miserable three-bedroom flat. Latifa slept in the kitchen and here she had to carry her mattress every night before settling down into the deep sleep of little girls of her age. Hayat’s sympathy, however, did little to better Latifa’s lot, because it was stored passively – in her eyes and her downcast look, the only refuge that Hayat had for her feelings.

  The image of Umm Ali, the newborn legend on the fighting streets of Beirut, the ruthless fighter who knew neither fear nor compassion, the ‘sister of men’, as they named her, was already well sketched in my mind, and I could find no way of relating this ferocious, aggressive character to the frightened, evasive little nine-year-old Latifa that I had known. Umm Ali was large and powerful in my imagination, whereas in my memory Latifa was still victimised and vulnerable. The atrocious absurdity of a civil war settling indefinitely all around you may confuse your sense of reality, and it can definitely upset your moral judgements, but there is one thing that it cannot permeate – the memories that preceded it, which are etched into the person that you are now. The amputated childhood of Latifa, the child, had been my first encounter with heartlessness and abject despotism. My own childhood was not far behind me when I began visiting Hayat’s gloomy home, and Latifa had settled into my otherwise carefree and happy adolescence like a sad and long-borne wound which never permitted me to enjoy my relative privilege.

  Latifa was brought to Beirut by her father and her elder brother, from a village in the north, up by the Syrian border. They had come to place her in ‘a respectable home, with good people’, as they put it. As if she were a business proposition. People who would pay an advance on her as a sign of goodwill, and then pay them a monthly fee for her services as a maid from then onwards. They pronounced that they had heard good things about Mr Farid and his lady, Umm Wisam – Hayat’s father, in other words, and his second wife – about their good reputation and their generosity. They were in no doubt that Latifa would be well fed, treated fairly, and given new clothes on the feast days, as well as being taught respect for traditional and family values and fear of God’s wrath for wrongdoing. They concurred that Latifa was too young to be granted a day off on Sundays. ‘Where would she go on her own? The town is too dangerous for a girl her age. After all, she’s never been away from her mother’s skirt until today.’ Umm Wisam, a shrewd bargainer, put on a sceptical air. ‘She’s too thin. We’ll need to feed her up before she can even start working.’ She was already thinking of the advance and the girl’s monthly wage. The argument over the fees went on for a long time, and foundered every time Latifa’s father refused to consider what he called a humiliating proposal or when Umm Wisam declared that she wasn’t really that interested after all. The brother and Farid then expatiated respectively on the subject of Farid’s honourable family – ‘which matters to us more than the money’ – or about how Latifa would never find a woman ‘as compassionate and undemanding as my wife’. Finally the deal was sealed, the money changed hands, and Latifa was now living in a new world, among people she knew nothing about, away from her mother’s arms, and a thousand years away from her childhood.

  At the end of the following month her father showed up on a Sunday afternoon as agreed. He was drunk. He took Latifa’s first wages, leaving her in no doubt that it was his money. He didn’t bother to take Latifa out, nor did he ask how she was doing or feeling. Umm Wisam couldn’t bear his breath, which was heavy with cheap alcohol, and his loud voice, which was ‘that of an unemployed peasant’. She convinced Farid and a very willing father that there was no need for them to come for their money. Instead it would be delivered to the village via the taxi driver, the self-appointed middle-man who had originally brokered the deal. Latifa was left there, abandoned by a father who had never wanted her, taken away from a mother who had never had any say and who was not able to defend her, and given to a family who could hardly make ends meet and who had no space in their flat – let alone in their hearts – for anyone as destitute and vulnerable as this nine-year-old girl.

  When Latifa was brought into Farid’s home, Umm Wisam was going through a very unhappy transformation in her life and status. She had always resented the permanent presence of her mother-in-law in her flat. She felt that it created a confusion as to who was the first lady in the house. Her mother-in-law occupied the largest room in the flat. She intervened in every little detail of the running of the household, and of Farid’s life and his relationship with his wife. And worst of all, she seemed to take it for granted that no social gathering initiated by Umm Wisam could happen without her being right there in the middle. And now, just when she had finally won her battle against Farid’s first wife, making sure that Farid visited her only rarely, and ignoring her complaints and advice, she discovered that Farid was thinking of entering into a third marriage. After fifteen years of their marriage, Farid was apparently wanting to exercise his right to acquire another wife.

  The more Umm Wisam lost ground, the more demanding and venomous she became. She resented everyone who lived in the flat. All except her fourteen-year-old only son Wisam. Him she spoiled, showering him with attention and adoration. He was her winning weapon in her fight against her first rival, who had given Farid only female offspring – three daughters. He was the only man in her life whom she could claim as entirely her own. Wisam was growing fast, in both girth and length. He became used to being treated like a little Pasha, and also to failing at school. Latifa became his scapegoat, and the focus of his and his mother’s frustratio
ns.

  Wisam and his mother felt exploited if Latifa was not seen working in the flat, which only happened very rarely.

  ‘We are not paying your father vast sums of money just for you to be fed and pampered.’ Such remarks Umm Wisam would throw at Latifa each time she saw her looking through the window at the children playing in the courtyard.

  Then, in the evening, after she had cleared the dining table, washed the dishes and cleaned the kitchen, Latifa would sit discreetly near the door of the living room to watch, with the rest of the family, one of the Egyptian sagas that occupied the TV screens and the imagination of the whole neighbourhood. But after a while the boy Wisam would order her to fetch him a bottle of Coca-Cola from the shop downstairs, or his mother would tell her to go and make sure everything was neat and tidy. Latifa would obey and bury her sadness silently behind her big eyes.

  Latifa was alone in her misery, and she was to be alone in her tragedy. Wisam was big and arrogant. He was becoming a man. The worst was bound to happen. One morning Latifa failed to move her mattress from the kitchen. Despite the calls of the grandmother demanding her morning tea – which Latifa always brought to her bedroom, where the smell of her wet tobacco mixed with that of her stale biscuits – and despite the threat of Umm Wisam’s retribution, Latifa stayed in bed, hiding under the faded pink quilt. Wisam had come into the kitchen during the night. There was blood on the mattress, confusion in Latifa’s head, and terror in her body. Farid and his wife became hysterical. Farid went looking for Wisam, who was not in the flat. Umm Wisam started accusing Latifa of having bewitched her son, of having tried to destroy the life of her wonderful child. Hayat left the flat and went to stay with her mother, who had no room for her in her flat. Voices were hushed in the three-bedroom flat, and the shutters were kept closed for fear of alarming the neighbours.

  Hayat told me later that Wisam had been punished – his father had reduced his pocket money by half, despite the mother’s objections. And Farid had started spending more time at his third wife’s flat. Nobody thought of consoling Latifa, whose eyes grew bigger and whose movements became more tense. She was forbidden to leave the flat, and was not sent out on errands for a long time after what they referred to as ‘the accident’. She was taken to a secret clinic to be ‘restored’, and regained her virginity through a stitching operation. Wisam was given money to go downtown, where prostitutes would solve his problems and bear the burden of his heavy body and his bad manners. Latifa was given a pay rise in expectation of a parental visit, which usually took place when her father had accumulated drinking debts. And there Latifa stayed, in that flat that was turning darker than ever, for Umm Wisam kept cluttering it with fresh objects to fill the space that was left by Farid’s increasing absences.

  I stopped going to Hayat’s flat. It was like hell. I could no longer stand the smell of stale biscuits, and the glittering array of knick-knacks that Latifa had to dust every day. But most of all I could no longer tolerate Hayat’s submissive tolerance of her family’s meanness. I should have looked deeper into Latifa’s eyes, instead of just bringing her secret supplies of sweets. Maybe, through their anxious stare, I would have seen the immense power that was swelling up, fed by her desire to escape from this hostile hole into which she had been thrown. It was not because of her anguish that her eyes were looking larger; they were feverishly, secretly searching for a way out. To a place where warm voices would whisper sweetly in her ear: here you belong, here we want you to be among us, here you are one of us.

  The civil war that sprang upon the country very soon engulfed the neighbourhood in which Farid’s second home was located. The stagnant, cosy routines of its inhabitants were so abruptly disrupted, and their streets turned so easily into an apocalyptic battlefield, that it was as if it had all happened under the spell of some magician’s wand. The settled little hierarchies of these petty bourgeois clerks, these shopkeepers and their families, were suddenly huddled into anguished corridors and damp cellars, in which their status was squeezed as well as their bodies. The powerful and the less powerful, the compassionate and the unfeeling, the arrogant and the timid were brought to one same, common level in their struggle for survival. Nothing of what had once been mattered any longer, in the apocalyptic fires that governed their fate at this moment. They all feared the streets, and submitted willingly to the chaos of control by trigger-happy fighters. Umm Wisam knew that if her son were to join one of the militias that had settled in the neighbourhood she would have less reason to fear for her home and possessions – but she was too attached to him, and more than anything she feared the loss of her control over him once he got his hands on a rifle and began mixing with those men who never seemed to have homes to go to.

  It was inevitably Latifa who got sent to fetch bread from the bakery when it was too dangerous to face the shelling and when snipers had emptied the busy streets of shoppers. When Farid’s family rushed down to the basement, alarmed by the closeness of battle and the wheezing criss-cross of gunfire, it was she who was sent back to the flat to fetch the blankets, or the grandmother’s prayer masbaha, or Farid’s medicine, or sometimes even the box of stale biscuits. As it happened, Latifa did not mind. On the contrary, she took her time as she went upstairs, savouring the silent emptiness of the flat. She even enjoyed being sent to the bakery, because from there she could watch the movement of the fighters as they crossed the street in zigzag formation to join their comrades in the basement next to the bakery which they had chosen as their headquarters. She felt no fear, but breathed an air of freedom in the new shape that the streets had acquired. She would soon be seventeen, which meant that she had been confined for almost eight years in this same street, with the narrow, unchanging view from the kitchen on the second floor where she lived. She found the changes that were now transforming this familiar, monotonous sight welcoming and exhilarating. The threatening flash and thunder of the falling shells did not affect her; they were just a secondary backdrop to her newly acquired spaces.

  Every morning she stayed a bit longer at the baker’s shop. She began to chat with the militiamen as they relaxed at the door of their headquarters. They had a special self-confidence in their expressions when informing the bakery customers about the military situation in the area and of their plans for the neighbourhood’s defence. Their bold, authoritative attitude with anyone arriving at the bakery fascinated Latifa. They spoke to her in the same familiar tone in which they spoke with Sitt Saniya, Umm Wisam’s friend. Sitt Saniya had no maid, but was forever complaining about ‘them’ during her frequent visits to Umm Wisam before the war. Sitt Saniya was a familiar face at the sobhiya, the morning visit, along with two or three other housewives who lived in the same building or nearby. They would crowd into the living room, which looked even narrower with the nargileh and their babies, and would begin by exchanging compliments with Umm Wisam. The conversation would then develop into lengthy complaints about the shameful behaviour and lack of decency of all the people they knew and had never liked. Umm Wisam would tell them with rancour about Farid’s new wife, who was far worse than his first wife, and who was draining him of every penny he had, because she was from a very low background … and … and …

  But always, without exception, these gatherings would end up in unanimous castigation of the laziness of maids who ‘think they deserve to be treated like little princesses’ and who ‘are starting to make demands, as if we’re the maids and they’re the mistresses’. When Latifa entered the living room with freshly heated charcoal to fuel the nargileh or to serve Turkish coffee, the conversation would hardly be interrupted, for all the ladies in the gathering knew who ‘they’ was meant to refer to. So did Latifa, and that is why she loved the way the fighters spoke to Mrs Saniya: casually, and with no special respect. Latifa needed passionately to be like them, to become one of them.

  One morning, upon being informed that the militia downstairs intended to mobilise all the young men in the neighbourhood, Umm Wisam went hysterical. She
began hurling insults about gangsters and good-for-nothing thugs hanging about with their guns, and she asked Farid for money to be able to send her son away and protect him from such threats to his life. Wisam was now in his early twenties, and was neither in education nor out of it. His father was trying to find him a job as a clerk in the ministry where he himself was a clerk. But nothing was functioning normally in the country. It was a period of abnormality, in which men spent more time in their homes than in their offices, and students rarely attended courses. So Wisam was forever hanging about the house. Umm Wisam thought of enlisting the sympathy of the fighters who were threatening to enrol her son and take him away from her. She started preparing meals and the occasional large tray of soggy sweets as a treat for them. She would tell Latifa: ‘Go and take this food to the fighters downstairs. Tell them that Umm Wisam wishes them good luck, and thanks them for protecting us, and prays for God to support them in their courageous battle.’ Latifa was overwhelmed with excitement at the prospect of going inside the fighters’ ‘home’ – which was what she called their headquarters. She carried the trays with great care and immense enthusiasm. She carried the food down as if it were a treasure she had just discovered and was exhibiting to the world. Her heart was pounding and her steps were light and long. She sensed that her fate was about to change, and that her life in Umm Wisam’s kitchen was already far behind her, in a past that she had no wish to remember.

  The fighters’ home was spacious and bare except for a few mattresses piled up in one corner and the Kalashnikovs lying next to the three men who were sitting on the floor. Latifa made a great effort to hide the emotions whirling inside her. The words spilled out in a torrent. ‘This food is for you … I am a fighter too … I want to stay with you.’ She had rehearsed these words so many times that she wasn’t aware of how strange she must have looked, and how abrupt she must have sounded to the three men as they sat there relaxing between ‘missions’. She explained how eager she was to be one of them, to face the enemy, and how she did not fear the enemy and was eager to destroy him. She told them that she was willing to live in this ‘home’ and leave it only to accomplish ‘missions’, however dangerous or perilous they might be. When she realised that they were hesitating, she insisted that they follow her outside, where they could see for themselves what she meant. The street was empty near the bakery – none of the local people would even venture onto it, let alone cross it, for fear of falling victim to a sniper who had killed three people the day before and was still terrorising the district from his unknown location. Without warning Latifa dived into the street and ran in a zigzag as she had so often seen the fighters do, watching from her kitchen window. She stopped on the other side and raised her hand to flash a V-sign at the source of the stream of bullets that had missed her. Then, without hesitation, she zigzagged back through a fresh hail of bullets. The three men started firing randomly in the direction of the sniper, and as they ducked behind the bakery door they applauded and whistled with admiration. Latifa had made her point and won her bet. From that moment on she was to be called Umm Ali, the sister of men. Latifa learned that if she wanted to fit in with these men she had to build her image as the girl who knew no fear – always the first to confront the enemy and the last to flee danger. She knew that the only way for her to belong was by turning herself into a legend.