Beirut, Beirut Read online

  The driver raised his chin, using the well-known Lebanese gesture that means “no”. As they continued walking, the man with the headscarf asked him, “Where are you headed?”

  “Hamra,” he replied.

  “Why can’t you go by way of Mazraa?”

  “I don’t want to.”

  An old man, his face filled with wrinkles, interjected: “Please, driver. We’re late – we’ll pay what you want.”

  “Hey man,” the driver yelled, “I can’t take Mazraa. Those guys keep you held up.”

  “Look, it’s right by the Abd al-Nasser Mosque. Why can’t you go from here to the Cola intersection?”

  The driver thought about it, then asked, “You’re getting off at Cola?”

  The three of them agreed, and the driver asked me to move up to the front seat so the three men could sit together in the back. I sat down beside him, putting my carry-on and bag of cigarettes and alcohol between us.

  “That’s just like you Palestinians. Always causing problems,” he said as he started us moving again.

  No one answered him. Silence descended over the car for the rest of the trip. From time to time, I would catch the eye of the old man in the rearview mirror as he looked nervously between me and the driver.

  We emerged onto another city square. After a little while, we turned off to the left, and passed by a large building that showed extensive destruction. All that was left of its façade was a row of darkened crevices, one next to the other.

  Scenes of destruction followed in succession as darkness quickly descended. Locked-up shops lined both sides of the street, which was empty of pedestrians. The driver turned into a side street, then stopped near a high bridge.

  The three men got out of the car, and they collected among themselves several banknotes, which the old man handed to the driver, saying, “God be with you.”

  The driver examined the cash, then shouted, “Ten bills? That’s not enough. Who do you think you’re dealing with?”

  The three men exchanged glances, and the youngest responded, “That’s what we always pay.”

  A powerful searchlight suddenly fixed on us, and a military jeep approached. When it pulled up alongside us, we could see the emblem of the Palestinian Armed Struggle on its side.

  The driver cursed under his breath and put the cash in his pocket. Then he stepped on the gas, and the car sped off.

  We reached the edge of Hamra, and as he was about to stop, he said, “Here’s Hamra.”

  “Not yet,” I said. “I’ll be getting out at the cinema.”

  He proceeded down the street. Its shops and cafés were locked up, even though there appeared to be a few people about. Then he turned down a side street. A distracted look appeared in his eyes, as though he were thinking over some problem.

  “Where are you going?” I called out. “The cinema is on the main street.”

  “Now we’ll see.”

  He leaned out the window and shouted at the driver of a passing taxi: “Save me a space, Abu Hasan!”

  I asked him where he wanted to save a space. “The airport roundabout,” he replied.

  He began to drive aimlessly between the streets, so I told him, “We have to get onto Hamra Street itself. That’s where the cinema is.”

  He didn’t respond, but headed towards a street corner where several young men were gathered, armed with machineguns. He stuck his head out the window and shouted, “Hello, guys! Which way to the Piccadilly Cinema?”

  One of them came up to us and rested his gun on the edge of the window. He looked to me like a teenager with a mustache that had barely begun to appear on his lip. He looked me over carefully, then turned to the driver and explained to him which way to go.

  “These streets all look alike,” he said, as we took off.

  “Obviously you don’t know the streets of Beirut very well,” I said, trying to imitate the Lebanese accent.

  “We came from the south in ’78, after the Israeli invasion.”

  We emerged onto Hamra Street. In a few moments, the cinema appeared, and I asked him to turn into the street next to it. I had a hard time recognizing the hotel I was heading for, since everything was dark.

  I made him stop and I got out of the car. Then I turned around to take my carry-on and duty-free bags, and I found his hand exploring inside the carry-on. I wrenched the bag away from him, saying, “Shame on you!”

  He left his seat in silence, and opened the trunk, then he took out my suitcase and put it on the ground.

  I counted out thirty lira, then added five extra, and gave it to him. Silently, he put it in his pocket and drove off. I picked up my things and crossed the street.

  Dim lights illuminated the hotel lobby. Several young men were scattered on worn-out leather chairs. Some of them were armed.

  The employee at the reception desk dealt with me without much enthusiasm. I asked for the cheapest room with a bath, and he gave me one for forty lira per night. A young man sluggishly carried my suitcase and accompanied me in the elevator to the fourth floor. Then he walked ahead of me to an extremely narrow room with a torn carpet.

  I gave him a lira and he took it with a show of indifference. I locked the door behind him, then I leaned over the suitcase and opened the lock. I raised the lid and laid it against the floor. I got down on my knees and with my fingers groped around the inner lining. Then I pulled out a delicate leather frame that went around the entire lid. The frame submitted to my fingers, and peeled off the lid like adhesive tape.

  A slight crack appeared in the lid’s inner lining. I stuck my fingers in it and pulled out three medium-sized yellow envelopes. I put the lid back in its place and locked the suitcase.

  I took out the papers the three envelopes held, emptying them onto the bed, and arranged them according to how many sheets there were of each, then I gathered them all up in one envelope and put it in my carry-on.

  I washed my hands and face and slung the bag over my shoulder, heading out of the room to go downstairs. I left the key at reception, then went outside. All of a sudden, one of the young men stopped me, calling out, “Where are you headed, sir?”

  I looked up at him inquisitively, and he added, “Are you crazy? The streets are dangerous now.”

  I hesitated and looked around me. I noticed a payphone in a corner and headed towards it, as I pulled my notebook out of my pocket.

  Chapter 3

  I met Wadia Masiha when I entered high school. We studied in the same class, but he sat far away from me. We all wore shorts, except for two or three of the oldest boys, and we got a hidden pleasure from our bare knees rubbing together. In some classes, we would change places for this purpose, and everyone would sit beside someone he took a liking to. In this contest, I would strive to sit next to Wadia. He had long legs, with thick calves and smooth knees.

  We didn’t visit each other’s homes often. My mother didn’t like him coming over, and his house stirred up feelings of aversion and terror in me. In broad daylight, it was dark, and stuffed with old furniture. Sounds didn’t echo back there, and a distinctive smell wafted within it – a mixture of frying oil and decay resulting from the damp walls.

  Once I told him he was a “blue bone” without understanding what that expression meant. Instantly, his face grew pale and he became angry, then he stopped being friends with me. Two weeks later, I happened to meet him after we were let out from school. Several of the biggest boys in our class surrounded him and made him repeat “blue bone”. The look in his eyes terrified me. It spoke of a fear I had never seen before.

  We renewed our friendship at the university, which we entered together some months after the outbreak of the Egyptian revolution. We found ourselves among a group of ardent youth: we would read Sartre, Gorky and Lefebvre; we would attack Taha Hussein in defense of socialist realism, and attack the government of “military men” in defense of democracy. We would cross the streets of Cairo on foot, in our shoes with holes in them. Then we were all arrested when Gamal
Abdel Nasser tightened his iron fist in March 1954. After that, we went to prison together, during the climax of Nasser’s battle with the left.

  But Wadia left prison after only one week, while I stayed there until the general pardon was proclaimed in 1964. After a while, I found a job at a newspaper. I found him working there. He had become prominent in the government’s political organization, the Arab Socialist Union, of which everyone was trying to become a member. So it was no surprise that our ideas and opinions were in accord. We both felt the same shock when the Israeli aggression in 1967 resulted in our defeat.

  The next year, he was appointed to the newspaper’s office in Beirut. At that time, traveling abroad was our collective dream: it was easier to pass through the proverbial eye of a needle. I wasn’t able to do it until I had resigned from the newspaper and sought the help of several personal connections. I went to Beirut, where Wadia hosted me for several weeks. Then I left Lebanon, and didn’t see him for many years. But I knew that he had gotten married to a female relative of his, and had become the director of the newspaper’s bureau in the Lebanese capital. That didn’t surprise me, since he was capable in his work and had the most solid relationships with key people from all the different parties and factions and maintained meticulous records of every piece of information.

  The newspaper transferred him to its main headquarters in Cairo after the war in October 1973. But he kept trying until he got back his posting in Beirut in mid-1976. When he was recalled to Cairo after a year, he refused to return and resigned. Then he joined a newspaper funded by the Iraqis, and finally moved from there to a private press agency run by an enterprising Lebanese journalist named Nazar Baalbaki.

  I didn’t find it hard to get his home telephone number from the agency’s headquarters. I waited for him in the hotel lobby until he arrived fifteen minutes later. We embraced each other warmly, each studying the changes time had wrought on the other. He commented on the color of my hair, while I found fault with the weight he had put on and the prescription glasses that covered half of his face. Then he led me outside, ignoring my talk about the warnings I had been given about dangers in the street, saying: “I’ve got different identity cards for different situations. And we won’t be going far.”

  We entered an empty bar on a nearby street. “Will you be staying long?” he asked me as we sat down.

  “Several days,” I replied. “I don’t have a lot of money.”

  “Are you going to publish something?”

  “Yes. I have a book being published with Adnan Sabbagh.”

  “But he isn’t in Beirut now, I think.”

  I looked nervously at him, and said, “But we made an appointment to meet here on Monday. Do you think the recent events could have canceled this meeting?”

  “What happened is a normal occurrence – it happens every other day. The Lebanese have gotten used to that, and life now moves along naturally, no matter what. In fact, there is a helicopter company that transports people across districts that are fighting each other so their work won’t get interrupted.’

  The waiter brought us two glasses of whiskey. I looked around me and found that we were still the only patrons under the dim lights. The bartender was in the midst of a whispered conversation with two of his colleagues, and they looked over at the door from time to time.

  Suddenly the staccato sound of bullets reached us from outside. The whispered conversation at the bar stopped. We all listened in fear. Several minutes passed, but the sound wasn’t repeated, and hesitantly the whispering began again.

  “Where are you working now?” Wadia asked me.

  “Nowhere,” I replied.

  “So how do you make your living?”

  “From writing.”

  “Is that possible?”

  “Maybe. If you keep your needs within tight limits. And my wife was working.”

  “I heard that the two of you split up.”

  “Yes. We went different ways, in spite of ourselves.”

  “You should have done like I did. My wife and I only see each other in the summer. She spends the rest of the year with the children in Cairo.”

  “I don’t understand why you insist on not going back to Cairo.”

  He tapped the ashes from his cigarette in the ashtray, and with the tip of it began drawing imaginary circles in the air, then said: “Whenever I pictured myself there, I felt like I was suffocating.”

  We were both lost in thought, and then he asked me, “Who are you meeting?”

  “Just a few people,” I replied. “I don’t get around much anymore.”

  A crooked smile spread over his lips. “So you’ve quit your old friends?” he said.

  “You know what keeping in contact is like now. Traveling to Beirut is easier than moving between neighborhoods in Cairo.”

  “And how are things generally? The situation as a whole?”

  “Normalization with Israel is moving ahead. Prices are increasing and services are declining, too. Plundering is a growth industry, and the number of millionaires has grown to several hundred.”

  He looked me carefully in the eye, then asked, “Are you planning on meeting someone in particular? There are a lot of fugitive Egyptians here.”

  “I’ve come for one purpose only, and as soon as I’m done with it, I’ll go back.”

  “Tell me about your book.”

  I made a vague gesture with my hand. “It’s essentially a trip around the Arab world in a way that resembles the venerable maqama genre of rhymed prose. The hero turns up in every country, then he is kicked out, only to appear in another one, and so on.”

  He gave a slightly mocking smile, then added: “Is the hero a revolutionary or a Palestinian?”

  “Not necessarily either one,” I replied.

  He looked at his watch, saying, “We should leave now, before the streets become totally unsafe.”

  He paid the bill. I put my bag over my shoulder and we left the bar.

  “I’ll get lost if you don’t take me back to the hotel,” I said.

  “We’ll go to my house now,” he replied, “and in the morning we’ll get your things from the hotel.”

  “There’s no need for that,” I said. “I brought with me the cash I need. And I’ll be getting an advance from Adnan in a few days. He’s agreed to publish the book.”

  “You’re coming with me,” he said decisively.

  “I don’t want to be a burden on you.”

  “I live by myself. My wife and kids are in Cairo now. There’s an empty room you can have.”

  We crossed several dark streets without encountering anyone. At one intersection, two armed men came out towards us, aiming the muzzles of their machineguns at us. But they didn’t block our path when we continued walking steadily.

  Wadia took a deep breath after we had moved away, and in a muffled voice, said: “They belong to a new organization that took over this street two weeks ago. I don’t know any of their men.”

  We crossed a city square dominated by a demolished building, and he continued in his normal voice, “Now we’re in a neighborhood that belongs to the Mourabitoun. I have some ID that shows – I’m one of their members.”

  “Why don’t you buy a car?” I asked.

  “I have one, but I’m afraid to drive it.”

  We headed onto a street lined with buildings of modern construction. Wadia stopped in front of one, the entranceway of which was covered with a sturdy metal screen. He banged forcefully on it while calling in a loud voice, “Abu Shakir!”

  In the farthest part of the entranceway there was a door that opened up to reveal an old man with a beard, wearing shabby clothes. In his hand he carried a key ring. When he approached, I noticed that he was girded with a military belt with a revolver hanging from it.

  Abu Shakir opened the screen for us in silence, and we took the elevator to the third floor. Then I followed Wadia to a neat apartment of two bedrooms and a sizeable living room. Cushions from the Khan al-Khalili we
re spread out all over it, and a wooden desk sat in one corner.

  “Nice apartment,” I said. “How much do you pay for it?”

  “Four thousand dollars a year,” he replied. “The price is cheap because I got it a while ago.”

  I sat down on a comfortable couch near the entrance to the living room. Wadia brought a small table over and placed on it a bottle of whiskey, a bucket of ice cubes and two glasses.

  “I brought you a bottle of whiskey.”

  “Liquor is cheap here,” he said. “They sell it almost at duty-free prices.”

  He poured himself a glass, adding, “The different factions collect customs duties from the ports in their areas. The Maronites resort to lowering duties on cigarettes, liquor and television equipment in order to lure businessmen into dealing with their ports, and the others are forced to keep up with them.”

  My eyes wandered over the Pharaonic and Islamic antiquities arrayed on the shelves that covered one wall. Among them, I noticed a crucifix with a photo of Pope Shenouda dangling from one end.

  I looked closely at it and Wadia’s face turned deep red.

  “My wife hung that up.”

  I poured a glass for myself and lay back, saying, “Do you remember the woman who regularly visited you in ’68?”

  “Who do you mean?”

  “The woman who said she charged a fee of fifty lira a session, but because she liked you, she would make it forty.”

  He seemed to have forgotten all about it, or pretended that he had. At one point, he had asked me to stay away from the house on certain days of the week, claiming that he was hosting a married Lebanese woman. I noticed her once as I was going out, and her appearance roused my suspicions. When I pressed him, he said that she needed cash in order to replace her refrigerator. She reminded him that she charged a fee of fifty liras, but she liked him, and so she would give him a discount of forty. I expressed my willingness to pay the fifty lira, which he proposed to her, but she refused with disdain, and became angry with him. How could he behave like that when the two of them were in love?