Beirut Noir Read online

  * * *

  You would not believe me if I told you it was love at first sight. Rida was deejaying that night, and from the moment Souraya walked in through the door he knew they were going to spend the rest of their lives together. In the spirit of the glorious past of Club 70, Souraya wore a silver dress that glittered like a disco ball. Everywhere she turned, she was surrounded by light. Rida’s friend Saa’deddine el Abyad (meaning “the white one”) also took notice of her and immediately moved in for a dance. Saa’deddine was a bit of a lowlife who was wanted for numerous infractions of the law. He was called el Abyad because he always wore white linen and white snakeskin shoes, though his heart was far from it.

  Rida knew that he had to move in quickly. He picked up his new Cypress Hill album and put on “Insane in the Brain.” The crowd roared, started jumping up and down and headbanging. Souraya was thrown to the side and it was there and then that Rida reached his arm out to her and they locked eyes for the first time. As Souraya stood up, she hoped that Rida would not let her go. She hoped, in fact, that he would never let her go. He didn’t. He pulled her up to his deejay stand and, for the rest of the night, they spun records together. By four a.m. they were completely in love with each other and it was so obvious that even Saa’deddine accepted it. There they were, the three of them throwing back shot after shot of vodka, lemon juice, and Tabasco.

  Anything seemed possible that night. Hope. Freedom. Rebirth. Immortality. A great warmth fills my heart. It’s so hard to accept how we can be so generous, but also so violent with each other. Club 70 is a microcosmic representation of this city. These walls have seen everything from love to blood. During lulls in the war or periods of relative calm, dancing is what has always brought people together here. With music, differences and religions are forgotten. Bodies brush past bodies and become flesh without cruel histories. And now I too believe that anything is possible.

  * * *

  Today the Great Wall fell and I’m late. I should already be there by now. Today, a new era begins in this part of the world. Today, the Great Wall that the Israelis built in the heart of the Holy Land fell. No one knows how and why. The Apartheid Wall separating the West Bank and Gaza from Israel, seven hundred kilometers in length and eight meters in height, just disappeared. The largest concrete protest banner in the world, covered in layers of writing and graffiti, no longer exists. There is nothing left to protest about. The fences are gone too. So are the roadblocks, checkpoints, and security towers. The news is only just beginning to spread. Some people are panicking, others are rejoicing. Most are calling it an intervention from God, some an alien invasion. Souraya never had a chance to meet me because I am on my way to Mount Carmel. I am to be part of the new generation of Palestinians and Israelis who will find each other and make peace once and for all. I feel so content to feel so needed.

  As I climb up into the sky, I begin to summon the dead all around me. The dead who never received proper funerals during the wars. Whose bodies were left to rot. Whose souls were doomed to roam streets, confused, angry, and bitter. I call upon those in the mass graves here as well as in Syria and Iraq. I am building my army of forgotten innocence. It is our time now. It is time for a new way of life. It will not come easily, but it will happen. No more assassinations. No more bombs. No more borders. Resources will be plenty. Land will be shared.

  I hover on the blue metal railings of the Corniche, facing the sea one last time. Souraya is absolutely devastated and Rida has now heard the news. He’s rushing to her through impossible Beiruti traffic, honking his horn incessantly. Traffic that is not moving. He leaves his car in the middle of Hamra Street and starts to run, weaving his way through narrow roads lined with frail mimosa trees. They will be okay. They will get better. For a while, at least. Until the shit hits the fan again. But that is life, I guess. At least life in Lebanon. One bomb after the other. Life bombs. Love bombs. And bomb bombs. But we are resilient. Because we want to believe in second chances. And it may have very well just arrived.

  * * *

  I turn around and way goodbye to Ain el Mreisseh and the generations of my family who lived there. I take a moment, and from nowhere I hear Rida’s voice. “If I ever walked into a building and didn’t know which way to turn, I would always go left. If I were lost in a forest and found myself at a crossroad I’d go left. Left. Left is always the answer. Left is always a good choice.”

  Left seems like a good idea now. I stretch my arms out and hug the Corniche. I turn left and make my way south along the coast of the spectacular Mediterranean. Today, borders all around the world will cease to exist. My new army is guided by love. And nothing can stop love. So nothing can stop me. I can almost see Jerusalem from here.

  Originally written in English.

  Pizza Delivery

  by BANA BEYDOUN

  Manara

  “Is that even possible? That a person’s arm would remain stretched out, reaching up toward the sky after death . . . Or am I making that up?” she asked her friend Mark, the doctor.

  He said that medically it’s impossible, but added that there’s always a chance that things deviate from their scientifically expected path. But he also added that it’s so rare as to be quasi-hypothetical, and he couldn’t take it any more seriously than the possibility of being struck by lightning as you’re crossing the street. What was the name of that book that she kept borrowing from the school library, Strange and Wonderful Things from Around the World . . . or something like that? In one of the volumes there was a picture of a person who was burned, or “turned to charcoal,” as the book put it, immediately after being struck by lightning while sitting on the balcony of his house. Reading about this left her completely lost in thought for quite a while. She wasn’t able to say exactly if this was believable or not, and this doubt threw her into a state of intense disarray, for it had been very important for her—especially at that age—that there be clear and precise answers to everything.

  Perhaps was a difficult word for her, even a painful one, and remains so today. Perhaps means that anything, or its opposite, might happen. For her, perhaps was like a big zero that might explode in her face at any moment, like a giant egg that might contain an enormous, savage dinosaur—or that might simply be empty. She couldn’t contemplate which possibility was worse. Ultimately, even proven scientific facts were unbelievable at times. She remembered when her math teacher told her that if a minus sign precedes a negative number, it makes it into a positive number. She never believed this. How could two negatives produce a positive? When she tried to ask the teacher about it that day, she said, “Because that’s how it is.” In the end, she was grudgingly forced to accept this ridiculous fact, if only in order not to flunk. But after this, she went back to the equation every time she wasn’t able to find a convincing reason to explain her own stupidity. For example, this equation might be the perfect explanation for her love for Khalid, even though he’d brought her nothing but trouble—no doubt all of his negatives must have engendered something positive in her heart.

  Coming back to the question preoccupying her: Is it possible that the little girl at the Qana massacre died with her arm stretched out to the sky—as she imagined she’d seen it on television? What was she was pointing to . . . ? To something that caught her attention in the sky, perhaps the very same airplane that dropped the bomb on her? Or is this detail her own imagination’s strange addition to the true scene of the massacre? Once she’d read that sometimes your imagination can recreate reality according to your own image of it. For example, if we see a child at a distance, most of the time we presume he’s smiling at us, even if we can’t really distinguish his facial features. But that’s only because in our imaginations we see children as always smiling and, of course, always alive.

  * * *

  Maya startled awake from her inner monologue to a pair of black eyes staring at her and she screamed in fear, jumping back. The young man with the black eyes didn’t move but looked at her with clear d
iscomfort for a short time, then turned and walked on. It took her a moment to get herself together and continue on her stoll. It wasn’t the first time this had happened to her; she was used to daydreaming and getting lost in her thoughts while walking. Sometimes people passing by would inadvertently bump into her and she’d jump with fright. It would then take her some time to recover, as if she needed to plant herself again in the geographic space where she was.

  She continued on her way, daydreaming and pondering the mechanics of daydreaming itself—how the body can continue moving on its own as if completely detached from its owner. In bars, she would sometimes be jolted from a waking dream by some man sitting across the table smiling at her, thinking that she was looking at him. She was definitely better at seduction while daydreaming than when awake. This thought amused her, and she smiled and bent down to pick one of the purple flowers growing around the sidewalk next to Sanayeh Park, which she always walked alongside on her way to Abu Wadih’s bar in Hamra, where she’d gotten used to spending her evenings recently.

  The purple flowers seemed dark gray that evening in the shadow of darkness that covered Beirut after Israeli jets, as usual, had bombed the Électricité du Liban power plant. She remembered that time, during the last Israeli attack on Lebanon before this one, when she was forced to crouch alone in the darkness for the whole night. At the time, she was only fourteen years old and couldn’t close her eyes until morning came, until she could see all of her body parts and be sure that they were all there . . . There in the dark she gradually lost all feeling in her extremities. Every so often, she patted herself to be sure that everything was in its usual place, but with only her two hands it was impossible to touch every part of her body. Even when she curled up into a ball there was always some extremity escaping from her to roam around in the darkness and slowly transform into a strange shape. Her hand suddenly became a snail, another time it stretched out like a ruler, then floated down like soft cotton. It wasn’t just the sounds of bombs continuing all night long that made her anxious, but the thought of death while still imprisoned in the body of darkness, before the light could come to separate their two bodies, her body and the body of darkness. Light had always been her best friend, ever since childhood. Silent and warm, for some reason she always felt it loved her, still loves her, and that it alone could see what lives in her. She set the purple flower free, like always, and carried on walking; she didn’t know why it was so difficult for her to hold on to things.

  Had she forgotten about the flower in her hand, she knew it would slowly be strangled there, gnawing at her extremities, squeezed and crushed until it completely lost its color. She’d do this unintentionally, preoccupied by some idea in her head, then suddenly realize what she’d done and get sad like a small child. This situation wasn’t limited to flowers but to almost everything, no matter if it was trivial or important. After this digression, she remembered the ring that Khalid had given her before his trip. She examined her finger, looking for the ring but not finding it there. She must have forgotten it at home on the sink again, though she didn’t really have to keep taking it off since it was gold, and soap and water wouldn’t damage it, as her girlfriend had informed her. She kept doing it, however, because she kept imagining that there was something stuck to it. She didn’t want this ring to get lost—like the other gifts people had given her over the years—even Khalid didn’t know the effort she expended every day to hold on to this gift, which she sometimes felt was a trust or heavy burden. Khalid wasn’t like her, he held on to everything, even the smallest, most insignificant thing. His house was a strange museum, a collection of memories of every person who had passed through his life. One day she opened a small drawer next to his bed and found things that were hers, things that even she had forgotten about—a small red hair band, a soft leather bracelet, a flyer for a play she directed a long time ago, and small pieces of paper with some of her scribbles and incomprehensible words written on them. She really didn’t understand why he kept all of these things, and when she asked him, his answer only increased her bewilderment:

  Maya: Khalid, what’s all this stuff?

  Khalid: It’s all yours, the hair band you forgot in the wash the first time you slept over at my place, the poster from the first time we met, you were hanging it on a wall in Hamra and I helped you, remember?

  Maya: Yeah. The poster, yeah . . . the hair band, no. I thought it was the second time, when I came over to fight with you.

  Khalid: You know . . . I’ve saved all our Facebook chats in a special file on my computer, along with all our phone messages from the time we met until now.

  Maya: Why?

  Khalid: I’m scared of my phone being lost or stolen, I don’t know . . .

  She remembered that she’d felt happy at the time. But she was also embarrassed that she couldn’t recall all these details and wondered if this meant that she didn’t love him enough. Her happiness didn’t last long, however, because a few days later she opened another drawer by chance and in it she found that he’d kept mementos of his old girlfriend, Nisrine, arranged with the same enthusiasm and care as her things.

  * * *

  She stopped for a moment to try to listen to the sounds from Sanayeh Park, inside the white tents put up by the internally displaced people, fleeing Israeli bombings in the south and southern suburbs. She remembered her friend Majd, who’d said jokingly that morning that Xanax and condoms topped the IDPs’ wish list. She didn’t know why she didn’t find this funny, but hurtful. It reminded her of a recurrent nightmare in which she found herself in the middle of the street wearing her pajamas, or the one where she’s jolted awake among a bunch of strangers in her bedroom—that terrifying feeling that your private life has become public. She responded to Majd by asking him if he’d stopped having sex since the beginning of the war. He seemed embarrassed by her question, and replied in the negative.

  One night, when she was still studying for her baccalaureate, she snuck over the park’s walls with her friend Rami. She remembered how happy she’d felt to stretch out on the damp lawn, and how much happier she would have been if Rami, who she didn’t like all that much, had not tried to hit on her the whole time. She wasn’t attracted to him, she’d only gone with him for the thrill of sneaking in. It occurred to her that she should sneak into the garden now, go into a random tent, and lie down there. Anywhere would be better than going back home, where she wouldn’t find Khalid. She didn’t know why she always felt peace of mind everywhere but her own house. Perhaps all the problems in her relationship with Khalid started when he moved into her house. She didn’t stop him; she was always living as though she were a guest in her own house anyway. Why did he do that to her? He planted himself in all the little details of her life and distanced her from everything related to his. He gave up his life to live her life, and then he gave up both her life and his and left to have a different one.

  Throughout that time he’d had a dream that he’d just leave everything and travel abroad aimlessly. She didn’t know why she didn’t understand this dream of his—perhaps it was because her feeling of belonging didn’t weigh on her the same way it did on him. Perhaps because she was fundamentally lost; this is likely why she was able to explore the same places again and again without getting exhausted or bored. She remembered that she’d read somewhere that fish lose their memory every five minutes, and that’s why they can swim happily around a little pond. They forget where they are every five minutes and go back to swimming around in circles to discover the same place anew. Until now she hadn’t found a better theory to explain her tremendous love for moving around in the same empty circles.

  * * *

  As usual, the voice of the policeman stationed in front of the barrier outside of the Ministry of the Interior across from Sanayeh Park woke her from her thoughts. He was flirting with her like always: “Bonsoir, mademoiselle.” And as usual, she didn’t respond and kept walking toward Hamra while listening to him chat with his colleague. This c
op’s behavior didn’t really bother her; in some ways it was reassuring. The idiotic repetition made her feel as though life goes on despite the war and state of emergency that were so alive in her head. She did wish, however, that she understood what kind of pleasure he felt when he spoke to her, because he seemed really satisfied with himself every time. Perhaps it was the simple pleasure of repetition and anticipation based on what’s come before—he knows that she won’t answer and she knows that he’ll always say the same thing. It’s like the pleasure we feel when we watch a scene in a film we’ve seen before . . . that prescribed feeling of simpleminded control, like we’re predicting something.

  She stopped to listen to the sounds of the bombing; the rhythm had remained the same for the past two hours—strange how people can get used to any sound if they’re forced to. The southern suburbs, which had been bombed throughout the assault, were no more than quarter of an hour’s drive from where she was—but they seemed very far at the moment, like Khalid did. She remembered her first telephone conversation with him after he reached Canada. He told her about so many things that he’d seen: the strange man who’d stopped him in the train station to ask if he could spend the night at his place because space aliens had taken over his house; and the beauty of the snow that was falling that morning. But she wasn’t really paying attention to all this. She was listening to another sound, the little sound between the words, like that little silence between the bombs now falling on the southern suburbs.