Beirut Noir Read online

  * * *

  I am Mr. Kaaaa and I am nothing.

  I sit down on the earth beneath the tree of melancholy, the lone tree, the last tree, my back against its trunk, my legs and feet sunken deeply into the grass and dirt. The plain lays out flat in front of me on a gentle slope, empty of anything that might hinder the coming of the wind. Not a pebble. Not a wisp of straw. Not a stick of wood. Leaves rustle above me and I know that I am about to expel my last breath. The eye looks up to the sky. A single cloud is passing by. A small cloud that doesn’t disturb the tyranny of the sun. I hear a crackle of laughter moving among the branches, a gentle breeze drops fresh buds on my face and head. I hear it prancing about frivolously, whispering before looking over on me from within the lacy leaves with two small eyes and a half-open mouth full of saliva. The eye trembles, delighted, quivering, tearing up, and fluttering before opening its mouth, filled with a voice tumbling down on the plain, touching the grass.

  “Khaaa . . .”

  Then a blink. And a dot. And disconnect . . .

  Originally written in Arabic.

  Eternity and the Hourglass

  by HYAM YARED

  Trabaud Street

  “Time doesn’t exist. In fact, it never existed,” Hanane mumbles aloud while waiting her turn. It’s been nineteen years now that she’s waiting her turn in the cramped room on the second floor of the G Building on rue Trabaud, a narrow street on the East Side of Beirut.

  While climbing the stairs two by two, she met the old lady who lives on the third floor. She pretended not to see her. Since she regained the use of her feet, she only takes the stairs. Upon reaching the landing, she looked at her watch. The hands showed 11:45. And we’ve reduced nothingness to this—she said to herself—to stupid hands on a watch. Time is nothing but an invention, an illusion. It’s not time that contains us—she tells herself—it’s we who perceive it. Time is emptiness that our consciousness makes measurable.

  She wanted to share her discovery with her shrink. The prospect of talking about it makes her feverish. It was already 11:46 when she crossed the doorstep into the waiting room. She sat down, like always, on the armchair next to a coffee table, buckling under the weight of newspapers placed there to kill time.

  The decor hasn’t changed in nineteen years. She bears a grudge against the patient before her who is encroaching on her time. Forty-five minutes of consultation. Not one minute more. She knows her shrink is inflexible, but today she’ll tell him—even if this means going over her allotted time.

  She even wrote down the date of her discovery. January 20, 2011. She wrote it down right at the bottom of another list of other 20th of Januaries, noted in black marker. She finds it surprising that her discovery coincides with her list of 20th of Januaries. The sentence came to her while sleeping. Time doesn’t exist. Upon waking, she jumped out of bed, seized her list, scribbled January 20, 2011, adding alongside it: Time doesn’t exist. The fact that the nonexistence of time can be written down as a date and time—specifically a January 20—made her smile. She wanted to mark this event in pencil at the bottom of her list. That way, she could unseat time at will, she could wring its neck. She counts them. That’s the number: nineteen 20th of Januaries. From the date of her discovery, nothing will ever be the same. Suffering. Pain. In order not to live these things, she’ll now be able to think about how atemporal they are.

  As soon as the door opens, she jumps up, puts her scrap of paper in her pocket, and smiles. The smell of his pipe wafting through the room comforts her. She knows it’s her turn. Every Wednesday she waits for her shrink to appear in the doorway. Waving his hand, he motions to her to come in. She gets up and walks through hurriedly. As soon as the door shuts on them, Hanane is more fearless than ever.

  “There is no time, doctor, there’s just a hole. My body is an hourglass. The moment copulates in my blood over and over again. Each second is a woman giving birth. I give birth to time ad infinitum. Do you understand? I am time. Today we are January 20, 2011—that is to say nowhere. Time doesn’t exist.”

  Hanane almost jumps out of her chair while speaking. Of all of this man’s patients, she’s the one who intrigues him the most. And exasperates him the most too. In nineteen years, even if her motor skills are in the process of being normalized, she nonetheless seems hopelessly stuck in mental lethargy. He experiences a feeling of powerlessness that he drowns out by puffing on his pipe. This morning, Hanane watches him preparing his tobacco like he always does at the beginning of a session. While filling up his pipe, he observes his patient’s hands. Sometimes it seems to Hanane that he doesn’t even see her. That he looks past her. She wiggles impatiently and continues on:

  “We all have it all wrong. It isn’t us who are captives of time, but the reverse. I live this space, therefore time is. Its measure is our consciousness. I’m telling you that in reality my body contains blood. Of the past. Of the future. Everything is an illusion. Atemporal, time is its own contradiction. It simply takes revenge and makes death flow through us. Do you hear me? Time is envious of the full power of our imagination through which it was born. It’s unbearable to be a captive. Do you remember the hourglass that my father gave us? He was proud of his purchase: an eighteenth-century hourglass that he bought for next to nothing from an antique dealer at the Basta flea market. Of all the many objects he bought while antiquing there, he only exhibited this one—putting it right in the middle of the living room on the mantelpiece above the fireplace. Now it has been nineteen years that this object of measurement sits proudly, uselessly, in the same place. We, too, remain in the same place. The sand does nothing. Neither does time. Vanity lies in how space is organized.”

  And then she stopped talking.

  * * *

  Of course he remembers the hourglass. Whenever she called for extra sessions, it would inevitably be because she’d been in contact with the object on the very same day. Merely seeing the hourglass would trigger a crisis in her. This conical object, its sand enclosed by two glass vials and connected by a hole, anguished her. At first, she remained planted for hours in front of the door to the formal living room where the object could be found. She never crossed the room with her eyes open. Whenever she approached the hourglass, she tensed up, squinted, and breathed deeply before continuing on her way.

  Despite the shrink’s advice, her mother refused to move the object. Nonetheless, nineteen years earlier, it was she who had brought her daughter for a consultation, on the advice of a friend. She followed her friend’s directions to reach the clinic. After arriving at the top of the street, they passed by an old lady with disheveled hair and too much makeup who was pacing back and forth on the sidewalk. Her comings and goings gave off the smell of cheap perfume.

  “If you pass a crazy lady standing on the sidewalk,” her mother’s friend said, “that means you’re there. She rents a flat on the third floor; she’s a nymphomaniac at the end of her career who picks up clients on the street. She’s ugly and she stinks. Since no one wants her, she offers her body—for a fee—to construction workers to jump on after work. From time to time she finds clients who are in greater distress than she is who are interested in her decrepitude.” Then, her mother’s friend added seamlessly, “Avoid the crazy lady, bypass her, and ring for the second floor at the large gate just behind where she is.”

  Her mother did as she was told. She pushed her daughter’s wheelchair, climbed up onto the sidewalk, and rang the building’s intercom behind the old lady. The man on the second floor who opened the door to them was charming. A tall man, he had a carefully tended mustache jutting out below severe, dark eyes. A certain intensity radiated from his profile. Hanane remained indifferent to men’s charm. She stared at her feet. The shrink motioned to them to come into the room in which there was a chaise lounge and two armchairs facing a desk, sitting behind which he seemed mostly to be protecting himself against the world. When he invited them to speak, Hanane said nothing.

  “Doctor,” her mother said, �
�for three months my daughter has found it pointless to move, walk, or eat. She remains stuck in the same position—sitting, her eyes staring at her legs. She froze, all of a sudden, on the very same day that my husband bought an hourglass. As soon as he took it out of its package, my daughter stiffened up. At the beginning, she was still walking normally—though more slowly—but nothing foreshadowed her refusal to move at all. It happened suddenly, shortly after the hourglass was bought. In fact, she stopped walking completely when her father died. She abhors her feet. She accuses them of wanting to make her move ahead. The idea of putting one foot in front of the other terrorizes her. She even refused to take part in the funeral procession. We visited practically every doctor in the city and did all the tests you can do. Physiologically, they detected nothing abnormal. She still stares at her legs, repeating endlessly that it’s pointless to insist; she won’t move forward. Sometimes she attacks them, swears at them, and accuses them of wanting to betray her. She screams at them, tells them that she’s going die anyway, that she’s already dead. Other times, she says she’s going to be born later. I don’t understand her delusions at all. Her father’s death made her go mad . . . Even to sit her down on a wheelchair I had to twist her around . . .”

  The shrink listened to the mother’s speech, his eyes riveted on the barely pubescent girl who gave no sign of life. And what if delusions consist of misunderstanding delusions themselves? He nodded his head before interrupting the mother and proposing that she take a forty-five-minute walk without her daughter. When she came back, he took her aside.

  “Ma’am, your daughter suffers from an inversion of time and an inability to adjust her perception of time to its usual standards of measurement. For her, moving ahead is regressing into the past. She moves ahead by going back toward yesterday. In other words, her future has already happened. She speaks of an hourglass sitting on a mantelpiece. It seems that this object is the trigger for this inversion. The sand moving through the vial terrorizes her. For her, it would need to slide from bottom to top. She’s devastated by the idea that time moves forward.”

  Her mother understood nothing about this explanation—a future mixed with an inversion of measurements that advance backward toward tomorrow from bottom to top—and even less about the link between the hourglass and her daughter’s illness. Until then, she had connected her daughter’s illness to her father’s death, on January 20th, 1992, a few days after the purchase of the hourglass. Seeing the object was when the troubles with her motor skills became apparent, but her paralysis didn’t declare itself until the funeral. Just a little before, Hanane had struggled to even walk past the hourglass. Each time she came near it her breathing became constricted. Sometimes nausea followed her dizziness. Violent headaches took hold of her. She felt she was being sucked into a hole. Sometimes she’d scream, “No, not inside! Not into the hole! I refuse to move, the past is dead!”

  Her father would lecture her: “Have you finished your tantrum? Move on.”

  Hanane would stagger forward.

  A few hours before he died, on that January 20th of 1992, Hanane struggled really hard to brave the living room door and walk toward the fireplace. Coming right up to the object, she took a deep breath, quickly grabbed it, and put it away in the dresser drawer next to the wall.

  When her father came back home, he took off his shoes as usual, breathing a long, satisfied sigh. Then, sprawled in his armchair—one hand on the armrest and the other fingering his rosary—he looked at the fireplace. Seeing the flat surface of the mantelpiece, as empty as it was smooth, his breathing slowed and, without any sound at all escaping from his mouth, a pain in his chest pinned him down right where he was. If it hadn’t been for the sound of the rosary falling onto the marble-tiled floor, her mother wouldn’t have realized that he died. When she saw her husband’s body spread out, his head tilted backward, she moved quickly: she phoned the doctor, called her daughter, phoned the doctor again. Powerless, she’d witnessed the first heart attack in a series that her husband would eventually succumb to that very night.

  Hanane observed the scene with equanimity. It was from that day on that she started making preposterous statements, accompanied by reverse body movements her mother couldn’t recognize. It was now impossible to make her put one foot in front of the other. As soon as the period of receiving condolences was over, her mother did two things that to her mind were urgent: she took her daughter to a shrink, and she put the hourglass back in the same spot where her husband had placed it before his death. Superstitious, she associated it with his death and feared that removing it would mean that long years of unhappiness would befall her and her daughter. The shrink indeed had to concede on this point, finding it wise that his patient should stay in contact with some kind of object that measured time, despite the symptoms from which she was suffering.

  “Births, I hate births. Out of birthing spasms, my father was born, right before my eyes.” This is how Hanane told the story of her father’s death to her shrink the next day. She pointed her finger behind her to indicate tomorrow and wrote down her next session on pages of her daily planner that had already passed. He stared at her, while her movements remained all entangled, disjointed. Even the war had no impact on how entrenched his patient was. The mounds of dead bodies on TV elicited no compassion in her whatsoever. She feared living much more than dying, and showed no response to destruction. The few times that she revealed any interest in life during these nineteen years were in an effort to not upset her mother. She knew very well that her illness was making her mother sad. She would have really liked to take her in her arms, to tell her to stop calling upon “the Lord’s help in this curse.”

  Hanane couldn’t bear to see her mother selling her soul to an eternal being in this way. Eternity is only nothingness, she told her. “She prays to God, do you realize that?” she told the shrink. “She prays to an eternal being who depends on her.”

  Hanane didn’t plan anything. At the age of thirty-five, after nineteen years of therapy, things erupted inside her abruptly. She could launch into endless monologues and then right in the middle of a sentence sink into a silence heavier than a ton of leaden weights, then not move anymore, not speak anymore. At times, she would extract her little scrap of paper from her pocket and would pass the rest of the session feverishly scrunching it up. Eventually the shrink knew exactly when Hanane would take out this crumpled scrap of paper that she carried with her everywhere. Since she’d been in therapy, she was never separated from it.

  It was the therapist who had, at first, introduced the concept to her, inviting her to write down everything that crossed her mind. He had hoped in this way to make her regain contact with a chronological perception of time. “This is part of the game,” he told her at the beginning of a session, putting a sheet of A4-sized paper down in front of her. On that day, the forty-five minutes elapsed like that. Hanane didn’t say one word and was content to stare at the paper without moving. She had the impression that the page’s emptiness had spread throughout the room, devouring the shrink, his pipe, and the smell of tobacco. She shook her head a few times. Aside from several televised newsflashes, she didn’t think of anything that she could write down.

  Just before the end of the session, she grabbed a black pen resting on the desk and wrote diligently: January 20, 1992 = the death of my father = the arrival of the hourglass. Then, without warning, as though she’d never simply just stopped walking, she got up out of the wheelchair, betraying no sigh of surprise, and left.

  When she saw her daughter walking, the mother had to restrain herself from raving. The shrink had directed her not to show any signs of keen interest in anything in front of her daughter, for fear that too overt an allusion to her illness might block her anew. In any case, for him, victory resided above all in his client’s regaining her perception of time.

  For the first time, Hanane connected an object of time measurement to facts and dates. From this day on, she started writing down all events relat
ed to January 20 that came after the arrival of the hourglass. In her eyes, no other date in the year deserved to be identified. For nineteen years she only marked down 20th of Januaries. The shrink tried in vain to try to transform this exercise into a daily ritual, telling her that there were 365 days in the year, but nothing worked. Hanane only played this game on the 20th of January each year. This date was marked by different events between 1992 and 2010. Audrey Hepburn died January 20, 1993; Barack Obama was inaugurated president of the United States in 2009; George W. Bush was inaugurated eight years earlier; Arafat’s victory after the first Palestinian general elections in 1996; the former Argentinian dictator Reynaldo Bignone was arrested in 1999 . . . She even found it useful to compile an inventory of deaths caused by the avian flu epidemic on January 20, 2007.

  * * *

  Hanane is feverish. The shrink fills his pipe. Their silence is interrupted by the sighs that rise in a crescendo. Hanane knows that the neighbor on the third floor has found a client. “Orgasms are a noisy hobby. And useless.” The shrink is surprised that she says this . . . she who is so focused whenever he appeals to her sense of perception. She even refuses to confirm the existence of her own body, each time that he tries to draw attention to the fact that she herself has aged since she started coming to him. Hanane would prefer to be outside of time and of her body. The sighs continue to reach them. She has to speak or plug her ears. She can’t stand the upstairs neighbor’s small cries. She has to cover them up. She twiddles her fingers and starts talking. He doesn’t like it when she speaks in bursts. He doesn’t like her fingers either.