Leaving Beirut

by Ghoussoub, Mai;

  Scene Two: Said is standing with his left foot resting on the wall adjacent to the entrance of the building facing his own. A Kalashnikov next to him leans against the same wall; a cigarette hangs from the corner of his mouth. He is waiting for the Jeep to come and collect him. He knows how to jump in quickly, into the front seat next to the driver. He has told his mother, who had tried to stop him from going out, hanging on to his sleeve and begging him not to join the fighters, to keep away from the front door of the building, otherwise he would leave his parents’ flat and they would never see him again. He chain-smokes now. Cigarettes are plentiful and free.

  He goes into battles and into bars with his fellow fighters. They are courageous and aggressive, feared and courted throughout the neighbourhood. They would never let him down if he was in danger and he would rather die than lose their esteem of his loyalty and bravery. He rejoices in the fear that his Kalashnikov puts in the eyes of passers-by. The blood rushes deliciously through his veins when other cars give way to the Jeep he occupies. Nowadays he no longer has to queue. Yesterday he noticed how Mr Rafiq, the haughty customer who always prompted big smiles on his father’s face whenever he stepped into the shop, moved to one side to allow Said and his fellow fighters to jump the queue at the bakery. Said could see and feel the fear in Mr Rafiq’s eyes. Now Mr Rafiq’s daughter, the young and feline Salwa, comes and asks Said to fetch the bread for her family. She uses all her charm and has to hide the humiliation of it, for she has to ask this favour in front of all Said’s friends. She pretends not to notice their self-satisfied male expressions as she stands speaking to Said at the door of the building. Said indulges himself in creating situations where people will smile to gratify him in the same way that his father used to smile to gratify his customers. His anger at his father’s constant humility is never appeased. Humiliating others and watching how they fear him is endlessly exhilarating.

  Then there is that terrible night when one cannot tell stars from missiles. The night when people tuck their faces into their bodies, in order not to hear and not to see. The night that Said and his fellow fighters decide to take their revenge for the death of one of their commanders. People hear their victims screaming, begging. They wake up to the sight of blood in the middle of the streets, and the smell of dying fires and bullets. Children tell parents that they were shown ears that had been collected and exhibited by the fighters. Said was leading the fighters and telling them to show no mercy, said the baker, who never closed his business despite all the bombs and the shortages. The name Said is uttered with fear now. Leila, the wife of the barber, swears by God that his eyes have turned red and his hair has grown as long as her arm. Said is a killer, a hero, or a thief, depending on who is telling the story, depending on their fears and needs. For the women who used to love his innocent, childlike smile, Said has now become a symbol of violence and ruthlessness.

  I wish I had the courage to get close to Said now, and study his face closely. Would I be able to tell from his eyes if he really had cut people into pieces? Had he maybe just gone mad for a while, when the skies and the city and the earth were shaking and the missiles and bullets and bombs were flying? Now that the noises have faded, will he be back there, behind the counter of his father’s shop, ready again to tuck his pen behind his ear, and to teach his own children how to behave properly and smile at customers? When I have the courage to step into Said’s shop and greet him politely I will be ready to say that forgiving and forgetting is what we should be calling for. Until then, I will think of you, Mme Nomy. I will think of your lesson, and face my fears.

  Kirsten’s Power

  I have always cherished the anonymity of hotel rooms. In their square bastions of similarity, their depersonalised and serviced rooms, my isolation fills me with a sense of soothing detachment and something easily approaching serenity. My solitude in a hotel room has always had a taste of victory – a little triumph over my upbringing in a small city in which women were always under scrutiny. Here in these bland, neutral spaces, shielded by their frilled satin curtains and their half-hearted attempts at elegance, I can indulge in unspoken feelings of freedom, a comfortable and ephemeral illusion of independence. But on that fateful evening of 1989 I deeply resented the large empty bed and the dim lights that seemed to weigh so heavily on the room. This time my hotel room felt more like a sedate jail than a sanctuary of tranquillity.

  Copenhagen looked sombre and gloomy, and I was feeling sad. Sad like an orphan on a cold, bright, sparkling Christmas day. He was dead. He had been killed. And all I could remember was his broad, playful smile, his enthusiastic curiosity and his impatient, eager pace. His assassins did not care for smiles. It did not matter to them that he was young and full of humour, and that he had friends who would miss him desperately.

  Assassins aren’t usually concerned about such things. They killed him, and there I was, back in that city of pink and purple memories, of quiet bicycles and unpretentious beauty, staring into darkness and seeing only desolation. The streets of Copenhagen stretched bleak and gloomy as I watched through the blurred, wet windows of the taxi that picked me up at the airport. Where were all the colours and the cheerful images that had so enchanted me the last time I was here? It was just over a year ago. I had come to visit him and meet his wife Kirsten.

  From the day I first met Hashem in Beirut – one refugee among a thousand others who had fled their countries looking for a safe haven on the Mediterranean – we became close friends. But Beirut would no longer be safe for an Iranian dissident, so Hashem went looking for refuge elsewhere. Just as you did, many years ago, Mme Nomy, he sought refuge far away from the city where both you and I grew up. He ended up in Denmark and there he settled and quickly fell in love with Kirsten. She was wonderful for him. She made him feel at home in this so very different city. She adapted easily to his friends, and she fought tooth and nail with the Danish immigration authorities to bring his brothers and their families to join him in Copenhagen.

  His friends envied him. Kirsten was a woman who could soothe their worries and solve the multitude of problems they all faced. She cooked meals that reminded them of their mothers, and what’s more she had the looks of an angel. Kirsten looked like one of those unattainable blonde girls depicted in the English-teaching schoolbooks that he must have read when he was a child. Kirsten was too good, and Hashem was so overwhelmed by her kindness that he once wrote me a distressing letter in which he expressed his fear of being eternally indebted to her and her generosity. ‘It is difficult for a man to accept to be always on the receiving end,’ he wrote. He also proudly informed me that she had even proclaimed her willingness to wear the veil if they ever went back to live in his country.

  As I read his letter, I realised that he hadn’t changed much. He was teasing me about his luck in having found her. Hashem had never really accepted what he described as my ‘inauthentic’ feminism. He used to say that I’d been influenced by the Western values that had invaded my city and my group of friends. The more I read his catalogue of praise for Kirsten, the more I realised how much Hashem was missing his country, and also how much Kirsten idealized the ‘Third World’. She obviously loved the Third World, and it seemed that Hashem was her way of gaining access to it.

  I felt ashamed of myself – of my thoughts and my sarcasm. The silence of my hotel room was stifling and I was obviously misplacing my anger. The truth was that I was fed up with the sweet smiles that appeared on the faces of good-hearted Western liberals and leftists when they found out where you’d come from, and ‘what you must have gone through’. I found myself always wanting to tell them about the fun we had too, and the nastinesses we can be capable of, just like anybody else on this planet. Kirsten was one of those people who made me want to scream these things out loud. Yes, I’d been irritated by her goodness from the very first day I’d visited them in their tidy home in this northern city. It took me less than an afternoon to understand why Hashem’s letters, for all their praise of his wife�
��s virtues, seemed to suppress a subtext which spelled out stress and alarm. The fact was, the man was a prisoner of her abiding kindness and her relentless care. Poor Hashem, he could not even admit his own unease to himself. He was, above all else, a very decent person.

  The phone rang, cutting abruptly through the silence of my satin room and the desolation of my recollections. It was Kirsten. Her voice at the other end of the line was high-pitched and rapid. She inquired about my trip and the comfort of the hotel she had booked for me. She informed me, with the same rapid efficiency, that the funeral ceremonies would start at 10 am the following day.

  ‘If you don’t have a black dress, I can lend you one,’ she said, ‘We will start with a meeting at the town hall, during which leading personalities will pay their respects to Hashem and deliver speeches. I shall give a speech myself,’ she added. ‘Then we will pray in the church, for my parents’ sake, before we go to the mosque for the funeral ceremony. If you need anything, at any time, you can call me. I won’t be sleeping tonight.’

  She hung up before I could say anything. I could not find one right word to express my sympathy for her loss. My hand seemed to be alien to my body as it put down the receiver. Now my room was more like an ugly cube in which I was condemned to spend a long, mute and desolate night. The energy in Kirsten’s voice had plunged me into a paralysing passivity.

  Did Kirsten know that Hashem had told me about his affair with Maria, and the problems that their marriage was going through? Did it make any difference now that he was to be referred to in the past tense?

  What about the other woman, Maria? Would I see her too the next day?

  ‘She’s like one of us,’ he had told me while we were walking across the Nyhaven. The absolute blue of the sky contrasted joyously with the brightly-coloured frontages of the buildings on either side of the canal. We walked in a feast of yellow-ochre walls and Indian-red roofs, enjoying the nautical flavour of this old sailors’ street. Hashem was eager to release his thoughts, oblivious of the many inviting cafés where we could have sat. He was in love with Maria, a Chilean refugee who was attending the same Danish language course as him.

  ‘She dresses in very colourful dresses … likes to eat sandwiches as she walks down the street … she understands exactly how I feel. We laugh a lot together … I feel incredibly guilty about Kirsten. I’ve tried many times to end my relationship with Maria, but I’ve never succeeded. I need her next to me. I long for her, and I’m happy and alive whenever she’s around. Kirsten keeps saying that she understands, but I know she’s unhappy. She isn’t sleeping well, she’s always edgy and tense, she watches me all the time. I feel torn. I despise myself for the pleasure Maria gives me, for the suffering I am inflicting on Kirsten. I wish she would hate me, kick me out, blame me. But all she does is stare at me with her big sad brown eyes. They always seem to be telling me: “Look at what you have given me in return for all the sacrifices I’ve made, for all the help that I’ve given you and your family”.’

  Hashem kept asking me what he should do. And I knew better than to give him an answer. There obviously was no answer, and he went on loving his wife, being in love with Maria, and being simultaneously happy and miserable. His life went on like that until a few days before my arrival, when he was shot … when he was left with no choice between happiness or misery … when the people who drove him out of his country decided that he should no longer exist, no longer speak, no longer write against their prisons, their beliefs, their despotism.

  And here I am stuck in a neon-lit nightmare, restless and sleepless in a city that lost all its gaiety this evening, waiting endlessly for the morning to come, for the dawn light to filter through those thick, pink curtains. Harassed and consumed by the same fear and always returning to the same question, like a scratched record: ‘Is there no end to our predicament? No place immune to the mess and misery that we have inherited from the past?’

  I was not exactly enchanted by either Kirsten’s generosity or her austerity. She managed, without ever saying a word, to make me feel guilty about every aspect of my behaviour. When she was around I had a feeling that my make-up was overdone, or my clothes too showy. Worst of all I knew that for her I had to be good, since I was from the Third World. Therefore she would not only tolerate me, but would actively like me. With her I felt like a specimen. And feeling like a specimen does not serve your ego right, believe me. But how can you explain this to nice people like Kirsten? After a week of this kind of generous treatment, I decided that Kirsten could not really be so good or so loving either. Not all the time and not to all of us. I felt that she had to be taking it out on somebody or something, sometime or somewhere. And then I was promptly riddled with guilt for feeling such a thing. She had managed to make me feel lousy and mean, and angry at myself for being insensitive to virtue and goodness.

  Hashem, being a man, had no problem being liked and adored. He indulged in anti-Western phraseology, and this made him something of a hit among Kirsten’s friends in Denmark. He had little left but his status of political refugee and his popularity, and he was missing his country, his noisy street and the familiarity of his mother tongue. But to be fair to him, he managed to hold on to his best features: his alert curiosity and the lightness that created fun and humour around him. I related to this lightness and I understood his need for success. It was all he had left in this very different city and this never-ending exile. Maria was sweet, wasn’t much of a one for health and ecology, never tried to dissuade him from smoking like a chimney, and liked only herself and him.

  We never agreed on anything much, Hashem and me, but we enjoyed each other’s company and we developed a kind of stubborn solidarity. We savoured this little tacit, teasing attitude towards each other, and we settled into our roles as accomplices of a sort. He was afraid of my getting too integrated into the West. ‘Beyond the point of no return.’ I, on the other hand, would scream at him for his endless need to prove that ‘the East is more human and less calculating than the West’. A common past was what united us, along with a capacity not to take ourselves and our disagreements too seriously. Even now, at this late hour of this eternal empty night, I found myself arguing with him in my head: ‘Hashem, honestly … If you had been assassinated in your own country, do you think that I, as a woman, could have come on my own, as simply as this, to stay in a hotel room in order to attend your funeral the following day?’ I realised that his answer would never come, and suddenly I found myself missing him terribly.

  I was the first and only person in the lobby of the hotel waiting for morning coffee to be served. Hashem’s picture was on the front pages of the newspapers, but I had no clue what they were saying about either him or his killers. They all had printed the same picture, a picture in which he looked very respectable. They seemed to be on his side, but what did that matter now that he could neither win nor lose anything?

  I was saved from map-reading my way across Copenhagen to attend the ceremony. Kirsten had organised everything and thought of every little detail. A taxi was sent to collect me from my hotel. The driver solemnly handed me a navy-blue scarf that Kirsten had wrapped in a package with my name on the front. I realised that many of the other women had been given similar scarves when I arrived in the taxi at the imposing building, where a small crowd had gathered. Kirsten came across to me immediately. She moved swiftly and purposefully, her face showing determination. Her black dress stood out powerfully in the midst of the silent crowd. As if it was a dividing marker between the low, grey sky, and the morose grey pavement.

  She thanked me for coming and showed me where I was to stand. Then she moved on to direct another person to the front of the gathering, at the entrance where the podium had been placed. Kirsten had the movements and gestures of a busy hostess ensuring that her guests were properly taken care of. A disturbing liveliness emanated from her eyes. She was overflowing with energy. Suddenly a microphone was handed to her and her voice, clear and strong, attracted all attention tow
ards the podium where she was now standing. She was reading a poem she had written in English for Hashem. I was hearing her voice, but I felt unable to listen. The whole setting brought back to me the reality of Hashem’s death. It hit me like a soundless slap in the face, weakening my knees and affecting me in the gut. Phrases and words – not meanings – reached me from Kirsten’s lips. She was going to ‘continue his mission’. Words like ‘comrade’ and ‘husband’ and ‘promise’ came through to me as if they were made of their own echoes. Kirsten ended her speech pronouncing what seemed to be a pledge that she delivered in Persian. My vision of her was blurred, my hearing was somehow numb, and I could not tell if this was the result of disgust or admiration. I was terrified by the disagreeable thought that I might actually faint in the midst of this assembly.

  I took a deep breath and dragged myself away from the crowd. I needed to see the river, to make sure that it was still there, that its waters were still blue and that its pretty boats hadn’t turned grey. As I was leaving, I noticed the ravaged face of Maria, who was relegated to a very remote corner of the proceedings. She was standing there like a distant relative whose own sufferings did not need to be taken into account. She had lost him, but was not allowed to share her grief openly with others who had loved him. I stopped and walked back towards her. I needed to kiss her and comfort her and tell her that I knew how much Hashem had loved her. I had a strong feeling that Kirsten was staring at me furiously. I did not dare look towards the podium where she was standing. A feeling of guilt and a sense of relief took hold of me as I hugged Maria – I really wish I’d had the opportunity to hug you before you left us, Mme Nomy … Now I was free to distance myself from Kirsten’s ceremony, to breathe a bit of fresh air. I dreaded the wide spaces of the city’s streets. I felt a desperate need to reach my square, cushioned room back at the hotel.