Beirut, Beirut Read online

  “Are there Egyptian women here?” I asked him.

  “Of course,” he replied. “Women looking for adventure, dancers, and women looking to ‘find themselves’. I know one of the female students who participated in the 1973 demonstrations. She settled in Beirut during the war. She came to me one day looking for a place to stay. My wife wasn’t here.”

  He lapsed into silence, and I asked him, “And then what?”

  “She warned me against taking advantage of the situation, and confidently declared that she would initiate things with me of her own accord if she wanted to.”

  “And did she?”

  “Once. But I left her.”

  “Why?”

  “I was afraid.”

  He stood up, saying, “This is the time of day when we have access to clean water. It comes early in the morning for two hours. The rest of the day it’s shut off, except for the two hours before midnight. I’ll fill several bottles.”

  “You’re luckier than we are in Cairo,” I said as I followed him into the kitchen. “We don’t get a single minute of clean water. Not to mention that our polluted water is shut off for most of the day.”

  Chapter 4

  Wadia gave me his children’s room, and some loose-fitting pajamas, which I declined to use. But despite the overpowering exhaustion I was feeling, I turned over in bed for a long time, unable to fall asleep. I finally dozed off after what I imagined to be the sound of a distant explosion came to an end. But I only slept a few hours, and woke up as soon as sunlight made its way into the room.

  I tried to go back to sleep, but to no avail, so I got out of bed. I put on my shirt and pants and went out into the living room. I came upon Wadia reading a newspaper. He was not wearing glasses, so he was holding it up close to his eyes. I said good morning to him and headed toward the bathroom. The water was cold, and there was no trace of heating equipment, despite the presence of two faucets in the sink.

  I opened the bathroom door and called out: “How can you live in the ‘Paris of the East’ without hot water?”

  “The water heater is centralized, genius. Turn on the left faucet.”

  I took a quick bath, then put on my clothes and combed my hair. I walked into the living room. Wadia handed me the paper, saying, “Bad news.”

  He read me a headline about new Israeli attacks, using Phantom and Skyhawk planes, against the cities of Tyre and Nabatiya in the south. The victims came to thirty-three injured and killed, with sixteen homes destroyed. Below that was another headline about the return of normal life to West Beirut.

  I looked at him inquisitively. He pointed to the lower half of the newspaper, then walked into the kitchen.

  There was a report about the arrival of an Egyptian military delegation to Saudi Arabia on a secret visit for shared military planning with the United States. And another report about a memorial service that would take place that afternoon in one of the churches of Hamra, following the funerals of Bashir Ubayd and Kamal Kheir Bek. Buried in the back pages of the newspaper, I found what was causing Wadia concern, under the headline “Loud explosion at dawn”.

  The report was terse, but the gist of it was that an explosive charge had been set off at dawn at a publishing house owned by Adnan al-Sabbagh. It caused enormous damage, but no one was hurt.

  I sat down on the closest chair and reread the article, then looked up at Wadia, who was setting out a tray with breakfast on the table.

  “Who do you suppose did it?” I asked.

  He shrugged his shoulders. “Anyone,” he replied. “You’ve got the Iraqis, the Syrians, the Jordanians, the Shia, the Israelis and the Libyans, etc, etc.”

  “Is Adnan linked to a particular faction?”

  “It’s hard to say. It’s no longer the case that people have ties to a specific faction. Nowadays everyone has ties to multiple groups in order to avoid surprises.”

  “But why did they blow up the publishing house when they knew for certain he wouldn’t be there?”

  “Maybe the idea was to punish him or to send him a message,” he said, pouring tea from a colored ceramic teapot.

  I contemplated the breakfast tray which presented, in the Lebanese style, an assortment of various types of foods, from boiled eggs to green and black olives, lebneh, jam, and zaatar mixed with olive oil.

  “In any case,” he went on, “he’s luckier than Salim al-Lawzi, who was kidnapped by the Syrians. They burned his hands before they killed him.”

  “I wonder how he’ll react when he sees what happened to his publishing house.”

  “I don’t think he’d dare show his face in Beirut now.”

  He dove enthusiastically into the food, and when he saw that I was holding back, he said, “Don’t be upset. Maybe you can contact him in Europe through his wife. She’s the one who oversees the publishing house when he’s away. You can be sure that what just happened won’t have any effect on his work. In fact, it may have helped him get new sources of support. And there are dozens of publishers besides him. Did you bring a copy of the manuscript with you?’’

  “Fortunately, yes.”

  “Then we’ll make copies of it and show it to a number of publishers.”

  “But that will take time.”

  “A week at the most.”

  “I was hoping to work with Adnan,” I said, giving in. “He has a good reputation.”

  “Don’t be naive,” he said. “They’re all the same.”

  I ate a little, and examined the rest of the newspaper. Then I volunteered to make the coffee. I wanted to clean up the remains of breakfast, but he insisted that I leave everything as it was, saying, “There’s a woman who comes twice a week to clean. Today’s her day.”

  I went to the bedroom, pulled out the thick yellow envelope from my shoulder bag, and brought it to the living room. Wadia had gone into his room, so I followed him there. I found him putting on his clothes. I noticed that his body, which had been slim when he was young, was now layered in fat in several places.

  “Maybe we can make some arrangements today?” I asked as I brandished the envelope.

  “Is this the manuscript? Today is Saturday. Everyone is heading out for the weekend. We won’t be able to do anything with it before Monday. The only thing we can do now is photocopy it.”

  I happened to glance at the side table next to the bed, and noticed a gun on it. He saw where I was looking and laughed, saying, “It’s only for show. I don’t know how to use it.”

  He pointed to the window. He had replaced the glass with a sheet of cardboard.

  “Can you imagine that two seconds were all that came between me and death? I was standing here, just the way you are now. It occurred to me to make a phone call, so I left the room. At that moment I heard the sound of glass shattering, and of something moving violently in the room and striking the wall. After that, I stumbled onto what was left of a rocket missile.’’

  We shared our ride down in the elevator with an elegant Lebanese man in a suit of white silk the same color as the hair on his head, which he had combed with considerable care. He was accompanied by a blonde woman in her fifties wearing tight black pants that ended at her knees, and which were held up by thin suspenders over her shoulders that revealed her chest.

  We walked in the opposite direction from the way we had come yesterday, passing a group of armed men under a balcony, over which had been raised the banner of the Mourabitoun. Sitting on the balcony was a tall young man with a vicious-looking face, wearing military fatigues. He had propped his machinegun against the balcony railing, and was engrossed in cleaning a long bandolier of gleaming brass cartridges. Several steps away stood an armored car bearing the emblem of the Deterrent Forces, next to a car rental office. Opposite the armored car – on the other sidewalk – a vendor had set out quantities of cigarettes, liquor, chocolate and condoms on top of cardboard boxes underneath a wooden umbrella.

  We made our way through several quiet streets. Sandbags blocked the entrances of the houses
, and empty cars lined the sides. Wadia pulled me by the arm far away from the edge of the sidewalk, saying: “Any one of these cars could be booby-trapped and explode without warning.”

  We walked down a street crowded with more Deterrent Forces armored cars. Perched on top of them were soldiers wearing steel helmets. The armored cars were standing in front of a building over which one of the flags was raised, and traces of damage appeared on the closed-up shops on the building’s ground-floor level.

  We emerged onto a city square, on one side of which stood a military truck. A machinegun was mounted over the driver’s cab, with a bare-headed soldier standing behind it. Behind the truck a locked-up storefront could be seen; above it was a torn sign, where the only remaining word was the Syrian-Lebanese Malhama, derived from the Arabic word lahm, meaning “meat”. And along the stretch of the street we were coming from, the remnants of another sign flapped in the breeze, this one with European letters on which the word “Bar” stood out.

  Several military cars passed by us, carrying the emblem of the Palestinian Armed Struggle. We walked in front of a hotel whose façade had been destroyed, and several young men were busy clearing the rubble. Beside it was a shop whose front window was bare of glass, revealing an elegant-looking man surrounded by modern display lamps made of two short, gleaming metal rods with round black ends. The man was collecting shards of glass with a straw broom and piling them up to one side.

  We reached my hotel, where I paid the bill for the night before and got my suitcase and passport. We headed out, walking on foot, towards Hamra. Gazing down at us were portraits of Saddam Hussein on a cluster of neighboring buildings, which turned out to house Iraq’s Rafidain Bank. A few steps beyond, the walls were covered with portraits of Hafez al-Assad, Khomeini and Gaddafi. A traffic light blocked our way in front of a building covered with Palestinian flags, along with portraits of Yasser Arafat and martyred victims of battles, hostilities and ambushes.

  I was instantly reminded of Cairo’s streets when we reached Hamra. The main thoroughfare, where traffic was one-way, coming from East Beirut and heading toward the sea, was crammed with four lanes of cars slowly moving bumper-to-bumper. The sidewalk was crowded with vendors, pedestrians, movie-theater patrons, and customers of sandwich, shwarma and drink stands.

  I noticed there were few women out on the streets, and the distinct difference between how women looked now and how they looked at the beginning of the decade. Gone were the imported chic and glamor that marked the 1960s and the beginning of the ’70s. But the elegant cafés still kept their wide glass-front windows. The luxury shops selling watches, jewelry, silverware and clothing were as crowded as ever.

  We slowed down in front of a book and magazine vendor who had spread out his goods on the sidewalk. I bought a copy of the Arabic translation of Miles Copeland’s Game of Nations, which revealed the secret of the well-known “game room” inside the Pentagon. Likewise, I bought several books that were banned in Egypt, among them one on the October 6 War and the Camp David Agreement. There were several porn magazines, including one that was new in Arabic. I flipped through its pages, and then bought it.

  Wadia pointed out a book by Naguib Mahfouz in an unusual format, and another by Jurji Zaydan in a cheap binding with faded colors.

  “Those two books are pirated,” he said.

  My face registered surprise.

  “They are photocopied from the original edition. Publishing here isn’t subject to rules and has no standards. Most publishers are thieves. They make an agreement with you to print, say, three thousand copies of the book, but they secretly print five thousand. Then they get out of paying what’s owed to you, making the excuse that only a limited number of your books were distributed.”

  We continued walking, then moved off onto side streets. We entered a modern building and took the elevator up to the second floor. I followed Wadia into an open apartment. On the door hung a sign for the Nazar Baalbaki Agency.

  Wadia’s office contained two desks that faced each other, a metal shelving unit for books and folders, and a television. The furnishings were obviously new and chic.

  “Does Nazar have money, or is someone else backing him?” I asked, as I put my suitcase next to the wall.

  He sat down at one of the two desks, pulled out a pile of newspapers and magazines, and began flipping through them. Then he said, “A group of rich people from the Gulf, so he says.”

  “But in reality?”

  “Libya, mostly.”

  I tossed my shoulder bag on the other desk, and sat down at it. I pulled out the envelope that contained my manuscript, and set it to one side. I picked up one of the magazines.

  A young man brought us some cups of coffee, and Wadia gave him the manuscript, asking him to take it to the archive so they could make three copies of it. Then he made several phone calls, the upshot of which was that he managed to get the phone number of Adnan Sabbagh. He dialed the number several times without getting an answer.

  Wadia was engrossed in his writing, while I made use of the books on the shelving unit to look up the addresses and phone numbers of several publishing houses. An hour later, the photocopies came back to us, and I busied myself going over them. After another hour, Wadia finished writing, and left the room. He returned after a few minutes and tried calling Adnan’s house once again, but with no success.

  He carried my suitcase for me, and we left the office. We took a taxi to his house. I went up to his apartment while he stopped off at a nearby grilled-meat shop.

  The refrigerator was filled with beer cans. I took out two and carried them into the living room. A few moments later, Wadia arrived, and we sat down to drink our beers while he turned the radio dial to search for the news.

  “There are at least seven Lebanese radio stations broadcasting from now until 10 pm,” he said. “One belongs to the Phalangists, and another to Suleiman Frangieh, and a third is run by American churches and speaks in the name of Saad Haddad’s mini-state in the south. The fourth one is Nasserist – it broadcasts songs by Umm Kulthoum, Abd al-Halim Hafez and Shaykh Imam, and is run by the Mourabitoun. And on top of that, there’s the official station.”

  Fairuz’s voice reached our ears, and I asked him whose station that was.

  “All the stations play Fairuz’s songs,” he replied. “Even though she’s a Maronite.”

  The news was calm: the morning funeral service had passed uneventfully. The parties and organizations had offered each other condolences and announced a desire to stabilize the security situation. The Mourabitoun station said that Bashir Gemayel, the military leader for the Phalangists, was making ready to announce a Maronite state in the eastern district on the anniversary of Lebanese independence, which would take place in two weeks’ time. As for the official station, it was interested in news reports of accidents and miscellaneous crimes – the most important of which was a crime that took place in Jbail province (a Christian area, apparently). Elias al-Shami had raped a woman named Mariam in the village of Ayn al-Quwayni, and when she became pregnant, he abandoned her. It was a huge scandal in the village, and a doctor agreed to give the woman an abortion. Then pressure was put on Elias, until – against his will – he agreed to marry her. Not long after that, he killed her with pesticides and then turned himself in to the Phalangists.

  I drank my beer before the food we’d ordered arrived on a big tray covered with clean linen. Removing the cover revealed paper plates filled with small pieces of grilled meat, and several plates of green salad and mezze, one of which was hummus with tahini, and another was green mint, a third was garlic mashed with potatoes, a fourth was pickled cucumber, and a fifth was pickled eggplant stuffed with garlic and green cilantro. There was a fork and spoon wrapped in thin paper. Everything was clean, neat and mouthwatering.

  We ate, dividing our attention between the radio and the television, which capped off the midday period with an episode from an American TV series. We both took refuge in our beds for a nap. But I cou
ldn’t doze off. I got up, went to the kitchen and made a cup of tea. Then I made some coffee for myself and for Wadia when he woke up. I put a bottle of whiskey and a container of ice on the table. We began switching between the television channels, moving between an American cop show and an Egyptian one with the title Loyalty Without End, and then the news in French. From the choice of evening programs, we selected an American film about the Beatles. We switched to Channel 5, and patiently waited while a long string of ads made their way through the expected roster of perfumes, cigarettes and foreign toothpastes, not to mention the Toshiba fan, featuring four blades and a nightlight, and the radical changes coming in the Arab region, as predicted by the Jordanian monarch in an exhaustive magazine interview.

  Finally, the film began, so I filled my glass and Wadia reluctantly agreed to drink also. By the time we got halfway through the film, we had had several glasses, and we gradually returned to the 1960s: prison, Vietnam, Gamal Abdel Nasser, ’67, the students’ uprising, Che Guevara, and Brigitte Bardot. It wasn’t long before we were overcome by a violent feeling of depression.

  Chapter 5

  The Sunday papers made much of reports of the security détente. Al-Safeer announced that the next twenty-four hours would be decisive with regards to the security situation in West Beirut, and the final and radical handling of what it termed “transgressions against personal security, dignity and property, and activities involving extortion and threats, protection money and robbery, not to mention entanglements between individuals and organizations, as well as undisciplined elements that frighten peaceful citizens and rob them of their dwindling insistence on clinging to their land, nation or cause”.

  The newspaper had a spread of photos of the meetings between the leaders of the different organizations and parties in West Beirut and the leaders of all the warring sides. One of the photos had them all together, with Yasser Arafat in the middle. Likewise, there were photos of the memorial service for Bashir Ubayd and Khayr Bek in a church, and photos of the funeral procession, at the head of which was a beautiful young woman in her twenties: Nahiya Bijani.