Leaving Beirut

by Ghoussoub, Mai;

  I have no way of knowing how Umm Ali felt among all these men – how free she felt in their smoky presence, eating tinned food, drinking tea through the night, and sleeping at odd hours of the day on one of the sheetless mattresses. She wore their fighting clothes and carried one of their Kalashnikovs on her shoulder. Her head was always covered with a keffiya, and her body flattened and anonymous under heavy military attire. People said that her voice had turned coarse and her manners rough. Like her comrades, she would shout brusquely at anyone who happened to get in their way, ordering them to clear the street for the passage of their showy, open-top Jeeps. Some now claim that they recognised her big inquisitive eyes. ‘Those eyes would betray her every effort at concealment.’ Her eyes were those of the combatants who kept watch throughout that terrible night when nobody dared sleep. These were the fighters who kept their fingers on the trigger, sending endless streams of bullets in all directions while their bodies stood miraculously steady and their posture unshakable. Latifa’s eyes were the only feature in her body that defied her efforts at total transformation, and resisted the creation of her new persona.

  ‘I’d recognise her arrogant stare at a distance of a thousand kilometres,’ said Mrs Saniya to Umm Wisam. ‘You can go and claim her back. It’s your right.’

  Umm Wisam would act as if she’d lost interest in the whole business, and with a dismissive gesture of her hand she would shrug off the idea of bringing Latifa back to the flat. ‘God forgive her … Even if she comes begging me to take her back, I’ll tell her sorry, no. My husband has daughters, and we all know what the presence of a girl like this can do to their reputation, when they’ve shamelessly spent their days and nights with all kinds of men …’ Umm Wisam shrugged her shoulders too abruptly for a person who didn’t really care. Actually she was terribly afraid of Latifa and of the secrets that she might be revealing to her new comrades. ‘These people might listen to her lies and try to harm my son,’ she would say to Farid whenever they were on their own. ‘The snake tried to seduce my Wisam, and since she failed to trick him into marrying her, she might come and take her revenge. She might attack our home … steal our valuables … set fire to it. There’s a lot of that kind of thing happening nowadays …’

  Nobody could tell which of the stories told about Umm Ali were real and which were the fruit of people’s imagination. The war was breeding a triumphant morbidity. It sealed absurd alliances and then turned them without warning into meaningless and bloody feuds. The rule of the arbitrary and the victory of chaos opened the way for people’s imaginations to run riot, expanding along with their fears and their frantic attempts to exorcise them. Latifa, the young maid, had crossed the sacred line that separates the sexes and defines their difference. Latifa, the poor servant who moved as if constantly frightened by her own shadow, was now walking and running through the streets as if she owned them. Her boldness, her disturbing audacity seemed to symbolize the new fate of the city. Nothing was secure or sacred any longer. People’s lives, homes and destinies could be, and were being, suddenly turned upside-down. Latifa no longer needed to do anything to preserve her reputation as a bold and fearless combatant. People who knew her, and those who only knew her by repute, were happy to inflate her legend. In their terrified lives only monsters and saints made sense, and only heroes and martyrs seemed cut out for survival.

  Umm Ali became a favourite topic of conversation in the shelters and the narrow corridors where people took refuge. People spoke loudly in these shelters, as if trying to beat the terrible thunder of battle with their voices, and they all spoke at once to prove to themselves that they need fear no danger in loneliness.

  Umm Ali was seen in many places at the same time. Once somebody had seen her in an Israeli jail, having allegedly been captured during a daring action inside ‘enemy territory’. But in those same days there were also tales of her exploits in the battle of the hotels in downtown Beirut. These exploits invaded people’s minds and dreams. Umm Ali was neither woman nor man. Latifa was no longer the vulnerable little maid. The perplexed confusion that her name evoked fitted well with the tumult and chaos that was everywhere. Life and death were now closely bound together, and it was as if they created another reality. Why should not Latifa the girl, now become Umm Ali the very manly woman, be present simultaneously in places that were widely distant?

  Umm Ali died. Nobody knows how or under what circumstances. One morning the baker asked Umm Wisam if she had any pictures of ‘the martyr Umm Ali’, when she was still Latifa. Umm Wisam was mightily relieved to hear of her death, because she was still convinced that Umm Ali would be coming to harm her and her son. Latifa had never had her picture taken. She died as faceless as she had lived, with features that were of no concern to the dead among whom she now numbered. Umm Ali was a legend too, and she had no features either. The walls of Beirut would not miss another picture; they were already too busy and had no space for latecomers. A martyr needs a face and a name, and Latifa had no family name. What her detractors never understood was that she had no wish for revenge. She looked beyond life, instead of looking back into it. She stepped into another reality and had no desire to remember the ugliness that had suffocated her. Umm Ali could have easily returned the humiliations that Latifa had suffered in Farid’s home. She could easily have spilled blood enough to cover all the mattresses in that wretched flat where she had once been made to bleed. But all she had wanted was to forget the smell of stale biscuits, the shadow of Wisam coming across to her mattress in the night, and the frustrated anger of Umm Wisam as she screamed and complained and ordered her around. She made a decision not to look back. And her legend faded slowly, like some old tale that never attracted the attention of an illustrator.

  The Metamorphosis of Said

  He helped his father, the grocer Abu Said, after school and at weekends. He had been an adolescent when he used to help us carry the brown bags of shopping up to our flat. I remember his big, ingenuous smile when he’d managed to carry three watermelons to our neighbour upstairs, who always bought food as if she was preparing for a feast. His presence was essential for the good of his father’s business. The reason for this was that many people in our neighbourhood thought it somehow improper to buy food in moderate quantities. Arab hospitality and generosity have a way of expressing themselves in the quantities of food left over after dinners and lunches. As a result, shopping bags were very heavy, and Abu Said, with his pen stuck characteristically behind his ear, just couldn’t cope on his own any more. He had to help his customers choose the best of his produce, calculate the bill out loud, make sure that nobody was being ignored or made to wait too long, and at the same time compete with the new grocer on the other side of the street, who had a flashing sign over his door and employed a full-time delivery boy.

  Said was in secondary school, and was doing well. ‘Soon he may go to the Ecole Hôtelière,’ his father would tell his customers proudly. There was a great future for those who worked in the hotel and catering business in Lebanon. That was before the war broke out. Said was a very familiar face, cheerful and sweet, in my neighbourhood before the war. Being the son of the grocer he always refused a tip when he came loaded with the bags of fruit and vegetables that we had ordered by phone. We would ask him about his grades, and he would tell us about his maths teacher, or ask us to help him with some seventeenth-century French text that he’d been given to study for his homework. Nadia, the manicure lady, had acquired a car, a small Fiat, and she had trouble parking it. Said would rush to help her with advice on how best to fit it onto the car-packed pavements. When she was in real trouble, he would take her keys and park it for her. Like many males of his age, he already knew how to drive before he was entitled to a licence. When he was late with the Sunday delivery, all the women in the building would panic. But they all forgave him when he showed up, because his polite, hurried, innocent looks told that he had been busy. Many women in the neighbourhood had already spoken to their husbands about Abu Said’s
son – suggesting that he might soon need a word placed here or there in order to get his school fees reduced, or that they might check if they knew anyone influential who could help this nice, hardworking boy to train as a part-timer in a hotel or restaurant when he started studying at the Ecole Hôtelière.

  I find it hard to recall my neighbourhood without also thinking of Abu Said’s little shop, the small square room that seemed magically able to provide all the goods you could ever think of. The colourful vegetable stands on the pavement next to his door were a landmark for me. They always gave me this relaxed feeling of familiarity when I arrived home. Inside the cluttered, disorganized and overcrowded shop there was always hope that you might find what you had come for. When Abu Said was too busy he would tell his son: ‘I’m sure if you search under those boxes you’ll find what the lady wants.’ And Said would almost always find it, and would hand it to you with a gesture of generosity and an obvious look of pleasure.

  It was difficult to think of the name Said separately from the young, helpful face of the grocer’s son. But things changed. Just a few weeks after the war broke out Said was no longer to be seen near his father. Anyway, the grocer hardly even opened the shop anymore, because it was too exposed, and few people felt secure coming to it – even when there was a respite in the shelling, or when the snipers had gone to bed. But on rare occasions Abu Said did arrive with fresh vegetables and fruit, and he sold them inside his shop, away from the unsheltered pavement, in those early days of the war. And when loyal customers inquired about Said he would tell them (with a pride that seemed hesitant, for it came just from his lips, and not from his fully expanded lungs, as when he used to boast about his son’s achievements in school): ‘Said has joined the fighters!’

  Soon the name of Said took on an important new connotation. ‘Said is ruthless,’ you would hear a neighbour saying. ‘Said is restless. He’s organizing the young men. During the day he teaches them how to attack and at night he’s a sniper.’ Said is the person that people call when they’re trying to find out about somebody who’s been kidnapped. Some disagreed over what his behaviour meant: ‘He is a true fighter.’ ‘No, he’s just been getting rich from stealing with his militia.’ ‘If your car’s been stolen, try Said, it’s probably with one of his men.’

  When the war reached its ultimate horror, people claimed that Said had been the driver of the car by which the body of a victim from ‘the other side’ had been dragged through the streets of the neighbourhood. ‘Said is a torturer.’ So said the less terrorized inhabitants of the street where we lived. The young and smiling Said was now never seen. Instead he was now imagined in the most frightening terms. Said had been turned by the war into a small monster. He should have been suavely and efficiently managing a little hotel by now, somewhere in one of the famous tourist and holiday resorts that the Lebanese were once so proud of. Both these Saids are real. I have seen many of them. Too many of them. Both before and after the civil war. I have seen their bright hopeful faces, and I have seen them ready to kill and torture. Sticking their Kalashnikovs in your face at some checkpoint, like hunters looking for a species that they’ve suddenly decided to eliminate from the environment. Who is to decide, now, who the real Said is – the Said who might be judged, now that everything is settling back into ‘normality’? Where did Said create and store all the cruelty that made him so feared and famous?

  Last year, when I went back home, I noticed that Abu Said’s shop was once again brightening the pavement with its fresh fruit and vegetables. Instead of the old feeling of security and familiarity, a sort of anguish took hold of me. What if Said was inside? What if I met him? Would I greet him with the same words that I used before? Would I look into his face and search for signs of cruelty in his eyes? Would he still smile as innocently as he had before? Could we all start again, as if we had had a bad night and were leaving its horrible nightmares behind?

  I crossed the street and walked on the opposite pavement. I was afraid to face Said. A sense of resignation, or defeat and tiredness, weakened my legs. Who knows …? If war crime tribunals had been set up in Lebanon, might Said and his like have been tried for their horrific deeds? Would I have felt more secure today? Would my legs have carried me more surely past the front door of Abu Said’s grocery?

  Back in London, in the safety of my flat, in a house that looks like all the others on the street, I conjure up Said the militiaman in my mind’s eye. The perfectly symmetrical trees lining the pavement provide me with the necessary boring-cum-reassuring feeling that makes Said a fading reality. For me he is now like a character in a TV movie. I can watch. Or switch off. Or follow in detail as he meets his fellow fighters in some lurid street in the hotel district of Beirut, preparing to face death, indulging in horrible actions and violent orgies of laughter. I can play with his appearance at my leisure, deepen the darkness of his eyes, make his features innocent and charmingly Oriental, or horrible, revengeful and bloodthirsty. All according to my own fears, my selective memories … and my own ability to face the unacceptable reality that the line that separates the criminal from the next-door neighbour, the helpful lad from the torturer, is not as clear as I had always thought before the civil war. So many things are becoming less and less clear for me, Mme Nomy. The line between the good and the bad gets much more blurred when you are no longer a jeune fille. In my mind, Said keeps on crossing this line. Back and forth and back again. He drives me dizzy as the flashbacks recur in my mind.

  Scene One: Said is not yet a criminal, his smile is still warm and childlike. For the past ten days he has not been able to go to college. All the roads are dangerous. Anyway, the college is closed. His father opens the shop for a maximum of an hour a day because the shelling has been continuous, and his vegetable stands are almost empty. Whenever his father crosses the street, rushing towards his shop, he looks like a prisoner on the run. He checks to see that no mortar, bullet or other flying object is coming his way. He shrinks his body to make it look even smaller than it is. His head retreats inside his shoulders, as if he is expecting a reprimand of some sort, and this infuriates Said, for he has often seen his father bending with humility in front of rich customers. His family seems so powerless. His mother repeats incessantly: what would happen to her and the children if Abu Said died on his way to the shop? She gives up getting dressed each day, wearing only a faded brown nightgown. Praying and fearing and getting poorer by the day.

  Then comes a point when Said can no longer stand his mother’s complaints. His father doesn’t really need his help in the shop. Said needs to get out of the tiny flat. To move. To do something. He is sick of the stories of people being killed in their flats while they were sleeping, eating, watching TV. His hatred for the other side, the enemy across the green line, is becoming unbearable. He wants to silence their shells, to catch their snipers, to frighten them and humiliate them in the same way that they are humiliating his father, destroying his mother, turning her into a hysterical, depressive woman.

  He does not do much. After taking some water up the stairs for his mother so that she can cook and so that they can take their baths upstairs, he takes his little transistor radio, listens to the same songs being played over and over again on the local station, and goes out on the balcony – despite his mother’s warnings and lamentations – and there he watches the group of militiamen who have settled in at the entrance of the building facing his. They have all that he does not. And they are free of all that he has. The sad, heavy, constant presence of his parents worrying about him. Asking him to hide and to keep a low profile, to smile, like his father, at every potential customer on the street. The militiamen are dressed in a relaxed but manly way. They sit on their chairs with their heads slightly tilted back, their feet stretched way in front; cigarettes hanging constantly from the corners of their mouths, they smoke and laugh and play cards just there on the pavement, next to the door of the building. When a Jeep stops with a great sudden screech of its brakes, two lithe and pow
erful young men jump out, adjust the position of their Kalashnikovs on their shoulders and give big, generous handshakes to each one of the militiamen that Said sees from his balcony. To Said these men are beautiful. The glamour that emanates from them fills his heart with dreams. He would like to belong to these men, to be as attractive as they are, to feel as young and powerful as they feel, instead of rotting in this miserable little apartment.