“Do you know what I’m thinking … I wish you’d talk to your grandparents for me and get them to tell me about their lives. From as far back as they can remember till now.”
I find myself adjusting my approach to you. Perhaps I should be like Juhayna. Laughing, I reply, “Why don’t you talk to them? They might be pleased. Let them get it off their chests.”
Just as I expected, Juhayna appears. She holds some basil leaves up to your nose. “Please. Smell these.”
“I prefer the smell of your hands.”
I go outside, leaving you together. Before my fears have a chance to jell, Juhayna comes after me. “If only I could go to France and learn to be a beautician!”
Finding me less than enthusiastic, she tries again. “Well, I could help Jawad in the house too. Cook and iron and wash his clothes and keep things tidy, and then go to college a few hours a week.”
My grandfather returns to you, as if what has happened between him and Juhayna doesn’t need to detain him any longer. What concerns him now is to get back to talking about the bastards who are running things, and local and international politics. He wants you to help him write a letter to the countries of the world, to be published in the magazines with the highest circulation, complaining about his situation and what has happened to his lands. You are observing everybody, especially Zemzem, who stands there in her new nightdress, delighted that it should be seen by someone outside the family at last.
Again you are trying to make my grandfather talk about himself while my grandfather complains with increasing vehemence about the occupiers and the families whom he believes are secretly implicated in this occupation, since they are looking for a market for what they produce. His voice rises to a despairing wail as he pleads with you to help him understand the world.
Only the sound of my grandmother’s voice, calling to him and Zemzem, silences him. As soon as they have left the
porch, Juhayna raises her eyebrows at me again, winding an arm around my waist.
“Juhayna wants to ask you if you need someone to take care of you in France, in exchange for board and lodging,” I say to you, pleased that your efforts with my grandfather have come to nothing.
You smile at Juhayna. “It should be me doing your ironing and cooking you meals and making you coffee,” you tell her. Then he adds more seriously that he lives in a small apartment, eats out, wears his shirts unironed and washes them without starch. At this point you turn to me and ask if Zemzem still uses blue in the laundry.
“Ask her yourself,” I say indifferently.
We can hear my grandfather shouting again as he reemerges onto the porch and as usual we tell him to be quiet.
You turns to me, your eyes shining, as if you’ve just remembered something important. You ask me if I’ve ever talked to the occupiers myself. “Imagine what a story it would make if you were to fall in love with one of them!”
The blood rushes to my head. “Why don’t you try it yourself?” I say disdainfully.
The gathering becomes muted despite Zemzem’s incessant chatter, which you encourage, Juhayna’s laughter, the sound of the radio from my grandmother’s room, and the voice of Billie Holiday in my private corner of the porch. I think I am listening alone until I hear you humming along. A gulf seems to have opened up between us. You are mean: the fact that you know her robs me of the feeling of having her to myself. As the others drift away or become caught up in
their own thoughts, and we are left with her voice, you say, “You know Billie Holiday. You dress like one of Chekhov’s three sisters. You laugh because your grandfather still has a roving eye, but when he really falls in love with someone, you chase her away and look for a substitute to take his mind off her. At the same time you get angry about absolutely nothing. I don’t understand you.”
I attempt to shout but my voice comes out calmly and quietly. Unconcerned by Juhayna coming up and sitting next to you, I say, “It’s because you’re self-centered. We’re material for your books as far as you’re concerned. You belittle our feelings. You want me to fall in love with one of the thugs occupying my family’s orchards so that you have a story that’s a bit different and can go back and tell them a piece of local folklore about the girl who fell in love with her enemy.”
You get up and walk away, leaving me trembling. Juhayna follows and the sound of your footsteps fades and Billie Holiday sings on alone. I hear one of the men camped below shouting, “Give us a rest from that bloody wailing! Put on a bit of Fairouz.”
I don’t want to be left alone. I go into my room and sit in bed with the light on.
The dead silence is broken by my grandfather calling loudly to Suma. The root cause of my annoyance with you is that you regard us with a foreigner’s eye. I shrug my shoulders. You see us as folklore. You don’t sense what we are suffering, our desires and limitations. After a few moments I retreat from this line of thought. Is the heart of the problem that you are not attracted to me? Am I jealous of Juhayna
and her youth? Or is it that living away from here you carry a beautiful picture of your homeland in your mind, while I see only a disfigured image of it? Does it annoy me that your imagination is a peaceful plain planted with crops, which you water, prune, and harvest, while mine has become an arid waste? An encounter with the past must restore a person’s soul, give him new life; otherwise why are you so relaxed, while I dangle on a thread of smoke?
I close my eyes and see myself lying on the grass in springtime and think, “Once I lay down on the green grass and looked up at the blue sky and said to myself, ‘Why am I scared of failing the baccalaureate when all this belongs to me? Even the wisps of cloud and the butterfly darting and spinning through the air as if she knows she will only live for a day. Everything’s mine, including those pale stars in the sky.’ ”
But this image fails to relax my face muscles or dull the rasping tickle in my throat. I long for a glass of gin but know I’ll be lucky to find anything but arrack.
I get out of bed and go to the glass cabinet in the living room and open the double doors. In a corner at the bottom are hidden the expensive glasses and the drink not meant for casual consumption: arrack for toothache and my grandfather’s heartache and an empty liqueur bottle. I hold it in my hand with tears in my eyes. My grandmother used to call it Franca Branca, and to this day she thinks it’s a medicine for stomachache. She used to give it to her friends when they were suffering from women’s pains, and gradually they would relax and sit around laughing and cracking ribald
jokes. The arrack bottle seems to be running dry too, but I pour the dregs into a glass and go back to my room.
I feel myself becoming light, my body floating above my bed, and I close my eyes and smile at the thought of you, taking you in my arms and trying to sleep. Thoughts go buzzing around in my head: what do I want from you? Only that you take me in your arms and press your lips on mine, and squeeze me to confirm that you’re interested. Am I crazy or frustrated?
I have to stop this rush of desire. I’m getting like Fadila. A sponge ready to soak up any moisture, a bird taking a sand bath whenever it feels the urge, not minding whether the grains of sand glint sharply under the sun or cling together in a damp mass.
However, recently I’ve written off several relationships, having woken up one memorable morning and sworn, by all that was holy, that never again would I close my eyes and open my lips unless I was in love. That morning, when I awoke, my body had looked so crushed.
Wrinkles had appeared on its pallid flesh; there were little hairs on my thighs; and the sheets were grubby and worn. A single hair of mine lay coiled on the pillow like a snake. I picked up my clothes from the floor and the edge of the bed and dressed quickly. The sounds outside had woken me with a jolt. I had seen glimpses of normal life carrying on noisily through the curtainless door: a family shouting to each other, children playing; even the worm-eaten date palm was part of the bustle.
I had looked down at the man lying beside me. I examined
the little bald patch, which he was usually so careful to keep covered, arranging his hair over it assiduously throughout the day. Did I know this man at all? This schoolteacher? Did I love him? I wanted to run away from him and the memory of the previous night, even though I had listened to him avidly as he told me how he would like to teach math and physics, anything rather than history and geography. He could no longer stand the hypocrisy of explaining with apparent objectivity how the administrative districts of Lebanon had been reorganized, found himself unable to ramble on about its snowcapped mountains and ski resorts when there were armed men at the top of the runs keeping the skiers in line.
The day before, I had swum with him in Saint George’s Bay and the blackened ruins of the hotel came into focus each time we wiped the salt water out of our eyes. Gunfire from the eastern sector rocked the foul-smelling water where raw sewage floated, and we joked and held hands. All the same, that morning I simply wanted to run away, because the street noise was interrupting my thoughts, showing me how the war had opened me up.
Now, safe in my grandfather’s house, I’m thinking about you again, and I can see my room through your searching eyes, the bed creaking with loneliness. You understand at last why this woman Asmahan still isn’t married. She’s hot-tempered; she derives her sense of superiority from the fact that her family owns almost the whole village. She probably looks down on men who fall in love with her, so she’s been rejected and sleeps alone. There are her books all over the place: art, politics, fiction, silly magazines.
I picture you picking up a book and flicking through it saying, “Strange. I never imagined she would have seen that director’s films; and how did she hear about this novel? She can’t have chosen the bedcover intentionally—she wouldn’t know what it would fetch in Europe these days, or this carpet. She went to university just to get a degree.”
I can see you shaking your head as you look through my books. I don’t like it when you behave like this; you remind me of a dressmaker who can’t see someone else’s dress without inspecting it and giving her opinion of the sewing. I think I’m being hard on you but it’s just that I feel your mind is more alive than mine. I felt the same when I was looking at your books in Ruhiyya’s house, and the things you’d collected: a little acorn, a dry branch, a decaying plant, a dried-up fig. I wondered why I didn’t feel this tenderness for such objects or think of saving them and why I passed by them blindly every day.
I succumb willingly to sleep and dreams, and when I wake up in the morning, I’m still writing this letter to you in my head.
To the War:
I won’t write “My Dear” to you since I don’t understand you.
It’s as if you’re dragging a Persian carpet from under my feet thread by thread and then weaving it together again from one moment to the next. Your air is warm: there is a stillness everywhere, even in the skies, during the cease-fires or the lulls in the fighting as the warlords wait for some tactic to take effect. Even the garbage heaps are quiescent, the midges and buzzing flies at rest. The streets belong to anyone who dares venture into them. When you return to violence, we inhabitants of the city approach one another, come so close that we breathe as one and no longer think of much outside ourselves.
You are not my dear, and yet when the situation was quiet, and there was a sense of the clouds lifting, those who’d
emigrated or gone into hiding started to pour back, the lights came on again to the sound of their laughter, and your mood changed. I noticed the change even in the café: with their arrival it ceased to be an oasis in the devastation and darkness, and we no longer took pleasure in drinking a glass of water there; it became a place to eat, and a fashion parade.
I find myself hesitating now. Why don’t I call you “my dear” when I talk about you so warmly? I am frightened of letting go of this odd feeling of intimacy. Naser would understand it: the fabric of my relationship with him was surely woven during successive wars. In the ’67 war the smell of freedom emanated from his house. I could almost see it like a fine tent of muslin put up for our meetings, but it protected us like armor plating.
Now after all these years I’ve changed my tone towards you. I’ve begun asking questions. What am I doing? Is this the life I was meant to live, or is there another path I should take? I blamed you for this instability, for leaving me in a wasteland without a glimpse of the future. You had a part in destroying my ideas about a new kind of architecture which would allow people to live in harmony with their minds and bodies. When I saw ruined buildings hastily reconstructed with wooden siding and sheets of tin, I heard you laughing at my ludicrous ideas.
I grew used to this frustration, and then you went away. Like everyone else, I welcomed the peace and rushed off to the beach and the mountains. But I kept my eyes fixed miserably on a small corner of the car, because when I looked out, it made me realize how lazy I had been: building activity
continued to flourish even though it didn’t produce structures of any beauty, and I felt guilty and full of regret when I saw the architects’ signboards dominating the sites.
When I tried university teaching, I could never escape the feeling that every word I spoke was pointless. All the buildings around us were threatened with destruction, including the classroom we were in. We looked at igloos and straw huts and discussed whether we should devise a new building material or be content with bunker architecture.
I left teaching and joined an association dedicated to preserving old buildings in Beirut, the ones with red-tiled roofs, small round windows, stained-glass fronts, high ceilings, and staircases with black wrought-iron banisters. We were supposed to photograph them before they were destroyed or dismembered by huge pieces of shrapnel. The work was hindered by communication difficulties between the eastern and western sectors, the worsening situation interfered with meetings, and then most of the members went abroad. Against my better judgment I began accepting advice, and as soon as I left one job I took another.