In the end he hadn’t been saved by the permits he carried nor by mentioning the names of important people in the resistance, since the militiaman holding him was impervious to reason and sense. All that saved him from certain death was the decision of the high-up official who came to inspect the hostages. Questioning Simon, he found he was wearing a bulletproof jacket and this convinced him he had tumbled on a foreign spy, not a press photographer, as the hostage claimed to be.
I couldn’t help wondering, as Simon told me he had finally decided to go, how he would live away from the war, which had become his full-time job. His office was the trenches, the barricades, and the empty buildings. I felt then that I didn’t know him and hadn’t experienced the taste of his lips, the weight of his body on mine, although sometimes we had been content just to hold hands in the darkness, which was so powerful and so soft that it drowned out the sound of explosions. We derived warmth and tenderness from the sound of each other’s breathing, like two old people obliged to be together because they shared the same dentures. As I said good-bye to him I held him close, even though it was
broad daylight in the hotel entrance lounge, promising to visit him in the eastern sector and stay with him for a few days every now and then. But as soon as I turned away from the hotel, Simon went right out of my mind; I thought about him from time to time when I wanted some affection, some physical contact, and crossed into the east as if I were walking a tightrope, swinging wildly between wanting to be with him and wishing I hadn’t come. Eventually the thread that had joined us wore away and we rarely met, because our city was divided in two.
After the duty-free market with its beautiful stone walls, the ruins, and the jungle of monster plants, Jawad and I take a road which leads us by women with heads wrapped in black kerchiefs. One of them has a candle in her hand: I guess she must make regular visits to the remains of the church there.
One day I had broken free from my father’s hand and gone into this little church. It smelled strongly of candles and incense and was lit by glowing chandeliers and the Virgin Mary’s face ringed with gold and silver halos behind protective glass. If you stuck a twenty-five-piastre piece on the glass, you knew that your prayers would be answered. I remember rushing outside to my father, who was buying vegetables, and pretending to be nauseous with hunger so that he would give me a quarter lira to stick on the magic glass in the church, then perhaps the glittering gold saint would exchange my father for a new one. But he wouldn’t give me a quarter lira and dragged me from one market to another and through a narrow archway into a little place, gloomy as a rat’s hole, which opened into another market
smelling of roast meat; here we sat down with a lot of men at wooden tables. I heard one of them saying he could eat three camels. I asked my father if I had to eat a whole camel.
My father used to have a shop close by which my uncle had been forced to sell when it became obvious the losses could never be recouped once my father had decided to work for God; he refused to make a profit of one single piastre on his fine-quality broadcloth, even though his brother and other members of the family took him to consult a man of religion, who urged him to return to buying and selling as before, limiting his profits in accordance with religious law. But my father renounced everything. He began selling off the Persian rugs in our house and my mother’s jewelry, unknown to her, then donated the money to mosques in Iraq, indifferent to her wails of protest: she had been proud that my father’s business was in the heart of a commercial area and well known to many people, and tried to make him do his duty again, threatening to leave him or devising ways to catch him out, but my father had moved into a world of his own, far removed from ordinary everyday life. He would have liked to be able to prohibit Isaf the maid and my mother from discussing mundane topics, so that they could spend their time and energy on praying. He stopped shaving his beard regularly, wore the same suit and pair of shoes every day, had his old red tarboosh repaired again, and even shaved his head for the sake of cleanliness and purity. His relatives gradually stopped visiting us, as all he talked about was repentance and Judgment Day. He advised one of them not to send his son to medical school, since God was the only true doctor, and said that instead he should go to Iraq to
study Islamic jurisprudence and law. So it went on, until we found we had even stopped waiting for him at mealtimes. In fact, it was a burden to us when he did appear, and my mother started up a flurry of activity in the house whenever he began to pray, hoping he would go to the mosque.
Jawad and I progress from the duty-free zone and Suq Sursuq to Al-Azariyya, where the smell of old books still seems to hang in the air. His father had apparently insisted on bringing him secondhand books, in particular from a bookshop here belonging to a relative’s family, and was never happy buying a new book, however cheap. Meanwhile, I am thinking of the Capitol Hotel and Omar Sharif. I tell Jawad about going to the hotel with thirteen-year-old Aida, who while on her way to take her father his lunch in the cloth market, had seen Omar Sharif going into the hotel. She caught up with him inside and told him about his admirers in her school. He was amused by this bright little girl who offered him some of her father’s lunch. “You take care of your father’s lunch, my dear,” he said, “and we’ll see you again sometime.”
Aida went back that same afternoon with three pretty girls from the top class and led them up to his room. He opened the door and looked embarrassed because he was wearing a hairnet to flatten out his crinkly hair.
Jawad responds to the mood of these memories, but proceeds to tell me of experiences as remote from mine as they could be. His thoughts had always revolved around phrases he couldn’t get out of his mind, and feelings which pestered him to let them see themselves on paper. He wrote his first novel and hawked it around the publishing houses,
who asked if he was prepared to pay the costs of having it published. As a result he stopped writing and put all his efforts into finding a way of leaving the country and going abroad, explaining to foreign consulates how vital it was for him to study in their countries, how much he longed to go abroad and experience a foreign culture, and describing his situation living in a house full of noise from morning till night.
I sit with Jawad in a café overlooking the sea with the ruins behind us. We hear the waves gently lapping against the wooden foundations and they seem to say everything’s still the same. It’s as if I’ve never left this chair, as if I’m still sitting with a group of students and we form a simple network of thoughts and ambitions. Now I can erase from my mind the vision of myself naked in his arms, grateful to the circumstances which have prevented this idea becoming a reality. I find that doing this gives me a feeling of strength, which changes to happiness and makes me fly above the café table, at ease and restored to myself after a long separation. I study my fingers and the palm of my hand, which seem important again.
As soon as we get up to go, the destruction is there in front of us again in spite of the sea, the sky, the sun, the leaves on the trees, the distant birds. We are uneasy too far from the sight of the war and its trail of refuse. Even the groups of soldiers, whether they are Syrian or Lebanese, arouse vague feelings of affection.
Everyone says “the eastern sector” and “the western sector” and your divisions have become a fact of life.
The eastern sector and the western sector. The old
names have faded in importance, names that seemed to have been there for all time: Jounieh, Jbeil, Al-Dawrah. New names have become prominent: Tariq al-Franciscan, Sudeco, the Museum with its mud and water, the smell of urine, and the people crossing from one sector to another with sorrow in their faces, a heavy weight on their shoulders, and the sense of frustration which escalates if this route is suddenly closed. People are always uncertain whether to choose the Sudeco route, where there is sniping, or the route by the Museum, which is more difficult and requires advance planning.
Jawad is studying the roads again, no doubt trying to recognize them. His silence, punctuated by deep sighs, speaks clearly to me, his thoughts burn straight into my mind and interfere with my memories. As I look towards Sharia Muhammad al-Hout he shouts, “That’s the racecourse! Would you believe it? The main entrance of the racecourse!”
The black iron gates have split right through and are covered in spots of rust like leprous scabs infecting even the gold whorls adorning the top of them. At Jawad’s insistence we go into the racecourse. People are dipping through a hole in the wall as if escaping into a green oasis between the trees. Despite the strong smell of urine, they pour through in their tens and hundreds, walking silently. They must be calculating to themselves the risks, hoping to reach the other sector without hearing a shot, and so they move as if they are on an urgent mission.
Jawad is thinking, “If they allow people to cross here, why don’t they allow them to cross anywhere?”
I’m thinking, “I’m sure these people are wondering if
they’ll find anyone to give them a lift when they reach the eastern sector.”
Jawad says aloud, “They are rushing through a bare landscape, between two sections of a city. Where are they going? Are they escaping from an ogre or congratulating themselves on winning their own personal Battle of Hittin? Or are they thirsty tribesmen who know where there’s another oasis with plenty of grass and water?”
I laugh at Jawad’s comparisons, although I’m irritated at the way he continues to look at everything as if he is turning it into a work of literature.
Some people are going to their jobs in the other sector carrying their papers and food. An elegantly dressed woman bends down and puts on a pair of plastic overshoes. She must have got them from Europe. Two girls strut along unconcerned, in high heels that plunge deep into the mud, on their way to keep a date. One puts a bit more lipstick on and the other rearranges her hair.
Jawad used to go to the racecourse with his family and play in the big gardens. There was nothing to equal the smell of the racecourse gardens: pine, chamomile, wild rose. He remembers Ruhiyya lighting a fire of pine twigs when he had whooping cough and making him inhale the smoke.
I have to strain to see the top of Sharia Muhammad al-Hout, where I was born. It branches off Sharia al-Sabaq, where we are now. I look at it, and at Sharia Hiroshima, and see an image of myself walking along the sidewalk where the restaurant was, following my father. I see my mother wearing a hairband like a twenties hat, right back off her forehead.
I see her laughing eyes. She gasps and says to my uncle, “Did the fortune-teller really say that?” My uncle is reading her the biography of the singer Asmahan. “You were born in water, and in water you will die.”
I can see my mother but not myself. For I am Asmahan and Asma. I see my mother, the beautiful child-woman, who suddenly turned and saw me there in her life. I call “Mama” and she remembers I’m not the singer Asmahan as a child, but her own daughter and what’s more, the daughter of a man whom she doesn’t want to recognize as her husband, because he doesn’t look a bit like her favorite stars, croon the latest songs, flirt, or even belong to the same epoch as her.
So when he lay motionless and Isaf’s scream reverberated through the house, my mother, assuming he was dead, rushed around burning everything which reminded her of him so she could return to the present. Asmahan. My own voice is calling now. Asmahan. Asma. I see myself in the street where a car is revving its engine ready to try to cut across into the eastern sector. Nowadays the street looks like part of a film set, with its façades built of cheap wood and stone and most of the shop signs removed or worn away. I can hardly make out the bakery, the Banana Bar, and the dry cleaner’s. My father’s building is occupied by squatters, except for our apartment, where I used to position myself before the hallstand, hands on its cool marble, gaze into the mirror, and repeat, “I am Nadine, daughter of the famous actress.”
I stood on the opposite sidewalk watching my father search intently through a pile of garbage, then make his way
to the restaurant. I bought a chocolate bar and stood sucking it slowly to make it last. I heard someone in the restaurant calling to my father, “Hello there, Haj Mustafa.”
I bought another bar and stood sucking it until my father came out of the restaurant, but I didn’t run after him and plead with him as my mother had instructed me to. I said over and over to myself, “Who are you? I don’t know you.”
A woman and her daughter were looking at me, whispering together, making up their minds to talk to me. They must know I’m the daughter of that man clutching the rags he found in the rubbish. I had my answer ready in a flash. The
haj
is a neighbor of ours. His wife sent me to fetch him back home. And if he called me
baba
as if I was his daughter, I’d wink at them and say he calls everyone
baba.
So the girl’s question took me completely by surprise. “We were saying you look just like that actress. You could be her sister.”
“I’m her daughter,” I answered immediately, with complete conviction.
The girl’s face beamed with joy. “See. It’s true. I told Mama: the resemblance is uncanny.”
“Do you live around here?” interrupted her mother in amazement.
I knew at once what she was thinking: stars and media people don’t live in this part of town. “Me? No. In Hamra,” I answered confidently, in an accent which surprised even me. “I come here for private Arabic lessons.” And I gestured to a building on the corner of the street.
We stroll around the racetrack. Signs of life persist there, but like a tree partly uprooted by a storm whose fruit continues
to ripen and change color from yellow to red. The pine trees are burned and dead. We see a jockey in an Al Capone hat, sitting like a pasha behind a wood brazier with a pot of coffee boiling on it. He smokes, aware that Jawad is looking at him, and avoids his gaze. But Jawad goes up to talk to him about the racetrack and tells him how glad he is to see him, for the presence of the jockey flies in the face of the war’s existence, and life around the track seems to go on much as usual. Horses look out of their box stalls. The trainer sits near the jockey in a short-sleeved shirt drinking coffee. Everyone still treats the jockey as king. He sips his coffee. Steam rises from his cup as he watches the horses, their tails and manes unclipped, roaming idly in the enclosure unattended by a groom.