Loe raamatut: «A Good Land»

Chapter One

Beirut is the city of dreams, at once magnificent and fragile, filled with instances of grace, ephemeral pockets of loveliness that can overwhelm even courageous hearts. There is colour here and brilliance, the hum of movement and its attending sounds; there are buried sorrows and there is transcending joy; and everywhere, flowing through the intricate, complex layers that are people and places, breathes unrestrained life.

Yet the city no longer possesses an obvious beauty. Very little of the lush greenness I knew when I was growing up and which once defined our many neighbourhoods remains. Beirut is invariably overcrowded with people and construction that is haphazard and garish, and areas that once hummed with life lack character and a real sense of community. What is it then that makes us love it so?

I live between the east and west of the city in a yellowed building tucked away at the end of an alleyway that begins on a bustling main road. The building has no elevator. Instead, the tenants have to struggle up a long stairway that wraps itself round the exterior walls of some of the floors and plunges into the building’s interior on others.

My second-floor apartment shares a wall with the outside stairwell which is often noisy, in the early mornings when other tenants are rushing off to work or school and late at night when some of them venture home again. And although it is part of a more recent addition to the building, the flat has uneven floors in places so that, walking through it, I can feel myself leaning towards uncertainty, teetering on the brink.

There is enough room in the kitchen for a table where I have most of my meals, sitting on one of the two chairs. Afterwards, standing at the sink, I look through the window out onto the alley as I do the washing up, a plate and utensils, a glass and a pot or pan, daydreaming into the future. And at night, lying in the windowless, small bedroom at the back of the apartment, I fall asleep sheltered by layers of comfort, my bed and the sheets and blankets that touch my skin, and the walls around me that enclose a deep, undisturbed darkness.

The neighbourhood is heavily populated, older buildings crowded in by newer and higher construction and pavements that are either narrow or totally non-existent. Small shops that sell all kinds of wares line the streets and the constant flow of traffic on the main road adds to the noise level and the impression of overcrowding. Stepping out into the street every morning, I am quickly enveloped by the energy that surrounds me and filled with hope, with the sense that wherever I turn, something is certain to happen.

I walk past a shop that sells tyres and spare parts for cars, a butcher’s, and a dry-cleaner’s that also doubles up as a telephone and fax centre. I turn onto the main road where cars jostle their way up the one-way street, almost nudging each other as they move in fits and spurts, their horns blaring. On one corner, inches away from oncoming traffic, a man sells fruits and vegetables from a large wooden cart, and beyond that there is a flower shop with fresh as well as artificial flowers in plastic vases placed outside its front window.

At a tiny corner café minutes from home, I order my usual cup of coffee and stand at a counter overlooking the street, sipping it slowly. Most days, I am the only woman there and the men on either side of me move away as soon as I arrive, their gazes averted. It is their way of giving me room and making me more comfortable, I know, but it is a kindness I cannot acknowledge since it might be considered too forward of me to thank them outright. Instead, I remain silent and look out onto the street, gathering my thoughts about me and observing the many passers-by.

In returning to Lebanon after long years away, I envisioned exactly this life for myself: moments quietly accumulating with me in the midst of a sea of people and activity, separate in some ways but linked nonetheless to the steady, relentless movement that fills the day.

I am on the stairwell when I hear the thud, feel it move from my belly down into my feet, the tips of my toes tingling with fear. I have heard this sound before and it is not, I know, the echo of a slamming door somewhere in the building, nor the din of heavy machinery from the construction site down the road.

Within seconds, neighbours come out onto the outside landing to investigate.

‘What was that?’ someone asks.

‘I’m not sure,’ I reply, my heart beating fast.

‘Sounded like a car bomb to me,’ another neighbour says. ‘God knows we heard enough of them during the war to know.’

‘Look, there’s smoke rising over there!’

We turn in the direction of the sea to see a black cloud forming.

‘It’s coming from the Corniche,’ I murmur with dismay.

A neighbour from the flat next door puts her hand on my arm.

‘Were you on your way to work, Layla?’ she asks.

I nod.

‘Maybe it’s best you don’t go out today. Until we find out what’s going on, that is.’

She is still in dressing gown and slippers and looks pale without her usual make-up.

‘Reminds me of the American embassy bombing in 1982,’ she continues, shaking her head. ‘That’s exactly where the smoke came from then.’

‘It’s Hariri,’ someone shouts up the stairwell moments later. ‘I just heard it on the news.’

We look at each other. ‘Hariri?’

Hariri is the billionaire businessman who served as prime minister for two terms after the end of the civil war. A larger than life character, he is credited with being the driving force behind Beirut’s reconstruction efforts and, most recently, has been pushing hard for changes in the country’s electoral laws.

‘Why would they want to kill him?’

‘Layla!’

I look up to see Margo gesturing from above, her mass of white hair more unruly than usual.

‘Come up, sweetheart.’

I run up the stairs and wrap my arms around my old friend. I seem unable to stop myself from shaking.

‘Something terrible has happened, Margo, I’m sure of it,’ I say, hearing the shrill of ambulance sirens in the distance.

We step inside and Margo turns on the radio in the kitchen.

‘Try one of the local stations,’ she tells me with her grainy voice. ‘You can translate the Arabic for me.’

It takes me a few moments to adjust the dial on the radio. I sit down to listen. The announcer’s voice falters as he speaks. I eventually turn to Margo.

‘Oh, my god. It is Hariri. They’re saying a huge car bomb has targeted his motorcade. They think he’s among those who have been killed.’

Margo frowns.

‘It sounded like a massive explosion. And at this time of day there would have been lots of people about on the Corniche.’

She pulls open a kitchen drawer, takes out a packet of cigarettes and a lighter and sits down on one of the stools by the sink.

‘I suppose any one of his political rivals might have done it,’ I say, shaking my head. ‘Or even an outside power. They’ve all been known to try to settle their differences with violence.’

‘Poor man,’ Margo says.

‘How could anyone do such a terrible thing?’

She reaches up and attempts to smooth back her hair.

‘I don’t know, sweetheart. But it’s hardly the first time something like this has happened in this country, is it?’

‘But we thought all that was long over, Margo. We’ve had peace for a while now. Surely it should have lasted longer than this?’

‘It’s no use trying to understand,’ she says, removing a cigarette from the packet. ‘Violence isn’t supposed to make sense.’

You should know, Margo, I begin to say but stop myself in time.

‘I dread to think what might happen next,’ I murmur instead.

Margo lights up.

‘No one can know that, Layla.’

It is not the reassuring answer I had been looking for.

‘You’re right, Margo,’ I say, feeling a little foolish.

‘It’s alright, sweetheart,’ she says gently. ‘It’s normal to want to be reassured at a time like this.’

By the end of the day, the death of Hariri is confirmed, along with the deaths of fifteen others, some from his entourage as well as some innocent bystanders. I watch the terrible images on the television. The huge crater in the road, the damage to surrounding buildings, and what look like charred human remains amongst the shattered glass and rubble. There is a great deal of speculation on the news about who might have carried out the assassination and grim predictions about the likely consequences.

For the first time since my return to Lebanon, I ask myself if I did the right thing in coming back. I could have continued to enjoy a quiet life in Australia where my parents and I had fled years earlier because of the civil war here. Mixed in with the anxiety and fear, I’m also feeling angry about what has just happened. How dare they do this after all that this country has already been through?

I sit on the sofa in my small living room with a blanket wrapped around me and eventually fall into an uneasy sleep.

I grew up in a neighbourhood not far from the waterfront where spring rains sometimes flooded the streets and, in summer, whiffs of sea air provided relief from the dank, persistent heat. My father and his brothers owned a petrol station on the Corniche of Ras Beirut, and my mother, a beautiful woman with a calm demeanour, taught at the school that I attended.

I remember childhood as a breezy existence that was only interrupted when civil war broke out, the grown-ups around me taking on a sudden heaviness in their manner, an anxious air, their brows often furrowed. Throughout the turmoil that ensued, my parents continued to love me quietly, not without intensity, but modestly and with deliberation, a love that did not demand reciprocation but rather offered me a good measure of freedom. Encouraging my progress in whatever I attempted to do, they did not push me to prove myself, and whenever I went to them for answers that no one else seemed able to provide, they would consider my question seriously before giving a reply, building in me a sense of self-worth that would stand me in good stead in later life.

Of those childhood years, I also remember the fragile feel of my body, long, thin limbs and my heart beating through my chest. I would run with a host of other children in the neighbourhood through the streets and across the busy thoroughfare. Then, sensing the growing strength that was mine, climbing over the blue railing at the edge of the promenade and onto the boulders on the other side, I would breathe in the sea air and watch the fishing boats bob up and down in the water.

After enduring several years of Lebanon’s sectarian and bloody civil war, my parents packed up all our belongings and moved to Australia to start anew. Arriving in Adelaide, we were warmly welcomed by relatives who helped my mother and father find work and eventually a home of our own. I was an adolescent then, awkward and unforgiving and unwilling to join in the grown-ups’ apparent enthusiasm for this new adventure. Still, as soon as life began to take on a predictable pattern, I was sent to the local school and eventually settled into the reality of being so far from the only home I had ever known.

We lived in a bungalow in the suburbs that had lemon and orange trees in its small garden and a front lawn that I liked to walk on barefoot, the newly mown grass rubbing against the soles of my feet and making them tingle. On Saturday mornings, my mother would take me into the city for hot chocolate and dessert at one of the cafés in the central shopping district. We would talk and browse through the shops and return home to find my father in the living room watching television or, when it was warm, in a straw hat and sunglasses relaxing on a deck chair in the garden.

Now my parents seemed like different people, took on separate selves that had not been apparent before they left Beirut. There were moments also when my own life seemed illusory and undeserved, until I felt I might one day have to rouse myself from it and face reality, though I did not know when or how that would happen.

I made friends, children like myself from a rapidly growing Lebanese diaspora, as well as young Australians to whom I felt attracted because they were boisterous and happy and unburdened by complicated pasts.

With time, I began to see those intervening years between leaving Lebanon and longing to return to it as a reprieve, an opportunity to garner the strength I would eventually need once I went back. I got through high school as if in a dream and once at university felt as though I was discovering another dimension to myself, one that was adept at maintaining this dual existence with composure. Then, after gaining my doctorate, I worked for a few years, making plans to go back home despite my parents’ inevitable objections. I cannot, I told them once it came time to leave, fully embrace this life when the one we left behind us still clings to me even as I attempt to escape it.

I came back to take a job as a lecturer in English literature at the American University, feeling safe in the knowledge that I once again belonged somewhere that mattered. Yet now that I have been here for some time, living the uncertainties that we all have to face, I am sometimes less sure of my intentions than I had been as a young girl, as though my initial resolve had dissipated over time, leaving me with a yearning that I can no longer clearly understand.

There are times when, unable to sleep, I put on my slippers, wrap a shawl around myself and tiptoe up the stairs to the upper landing where the lights of the city flicker through the dark. I lean over the concrete banister and sniff at the air and imagine I hear the sounds of Beirut calling to me, soft whispers that rise from the sea and then gently float up into the waiting sky, memories of a past I cannot leave behind.

The morning after the assassination, I sense a stir in the building and go out onto the landing to find out what is happening.

‘They’re taking the remains for burial in downtown Beirut,’ a neighbour tells me as he’s going down the stairs.

‘Where from?’ I ask him.

‘From his villa up the road,’ he shouts up the stairwell.

I go back into the apartment, grab my handbag and rush outside again. Once on the street, I am surprised by the number of people who are walking singly or in groups in the direction of Hariri’s home. Despite the crowds, everything seems eerily quiet. I eventually find myself being pushed along by the swarm behind a coffin hoisted onto the shoulders of a group of young men and draped with a large Lebanese flag. I recognize two of the bearers as Hariri’s sons. An ambulance inches its way ahead of us and I wonder when the men will tire and have to relinquish their burden to it.

As we move slowly forward into the neighbourhoods that lead into Beirut’s downtown, people continue to join us. Soon, I can no longer see the coffin. I look up at the buildings on either side of the road. The balconies are crowded with onlookers, some of whom are waving at the throng. Again, I am struck by the despondent mood that surrounds me. Passions usually run high at funerals in this country but everyone here seems subdued with grief. The silence only serves to heighten the ominous nature of the occasion.

I lose my footing and stumble before managing to pick myself up again. For a moment, as I look down to regain my balance, I notice some of the shoes worn by those walking next to me. Elegant feet in precariously high-heeled boots next to a pair of well-worn, fake leather lace-ups in an ugly shade of mustard; white trainers with their instantly recognizable logo alongside two very grubby feet in plastic slippers that make a slapping noise as they move. I lift my head and blink with astonishment. Although popular among much of Lebanon’s upper classes, Hariri has never struck me as a man of the people. Yet here we apparently are, rich, poor and everything in between, marching at his funeral.

On the outskirts of Martyrs’ Square where the politician and others killed in the explosion will be buried, hundreds of thousands of people are already gathered. The atmosphere here seems different, less restrained. I feel myself being forced forward by the crowd and, in my rising panic, grab onto a street lamp to steady myself. I climb up onto the low ledge at the base of the lamp and take a look around for a way out.

A short distance to the left of me, Druze sheikhs in their long, navy-blue robes and white-and-red headdresses walk past. Right behind them are Christian Maronite priests, their heads bowed and large brass crosses swinging round their necks. They have come from the mountain villages east of Beirut where the two communities have lived together for hundreds of years. Where are the Muslim clerics? I wonder. As if on cue, a group of Muslim sheikhs approach from the distance. They are in long robes too and move in unison, like a rolling wave, many with their arms crossed in front of their chests. From their headdresses, I can tell that there are both Sunnis and Shiites among them.

I hear shouts from the crowd up ahead and try to make out what is being said. The chanting catches on and soon everyone around me seems to be shouting for a free and independent Lebanon. I am not surprised. Until recently, the Israeli army had occupied the whole of southern Lebanon for nearly thirty years, and the thousands of Syrian troops who came here in the early stages of the civil war have still not left. This has not been a truly sovereign nation for decades. I realize that my own anger and frustration at the undue influence neighbouring countries have over Lebanon are being echoed here. And while I cannot bring myself to join in the political slogans, I begin to see that this sad occasion is providing an opportunity for all of us to express how we feel about the continued presence of foreign troops in our country.

I step down and take a deep breath. The dread at being so tightly surrounded by people has suddenly left me. We are united, I think quietly to myself, before allowing myself to be swept away once again by the crowd.

The university is built on a hillside overlooking the Mediterranean and boasts all the trees and plants that disappeared long ago from other parts of Beirut. Pines, palms and chestnut trees, sweet-smelling frangipanis, azalea bushes, delicate camellias, rhododendrons that produce huge pink and blue blossoms in spring and bougainvillea that turns a brilliant purple, a feast for the eyes. All this and swathes of greenery too, lawns and evergreen shrubs, rubber plants and gorse bushes; and then the eternal backdrop of the azure sea that stretches horizons so far one senses release at the end of it.

My office is in one of a number of two-storey stone buildings with red rooftops that dot the campus. It is small with laden bookshelves lining its walls, and is almost overwhelmed by a heavy, battered desk that has served many other lecturers before me. By the window, only a few inches from the door, is an old armchair that I sit in when I am reading or merely want to think, looking out now and then at the greenery or at students stopping to chat or walking to and from their classes. At times, I lean back in the armchair and close my eyes for a moment and, breathing in the silence around me, try to picture the me that came before this, the promise that brought me back to this city of light and shadows.

When I was a child, my mother told me stories that she made up as I sat in bed waiting to fall asleep. They were not fantastical tales, but described the adventures of a little girl who, like me, lived with her parents in Ras Beirut in an apartment not far from the sea. Eventually, I took on the role of storyteller too, adding details to mama’s accounts of the girl’s life, changing an ending whenever I felt it needed it and seeing myself as the heroine of an unyielding imagination. My father, on the other hand, bought me books, sat me in his lap and, opening them carefully, read out the title and the writer’s name before moving on to the story itself, anticipation in his lilting voice. I would look at the illustrations as he read and run a finger along the lines of words in wonder, and feel them swirl around in my head like clouds in the wind.

There are times when I think the two notions of storytelling and books have forever become muddled up in my mind. Even as I grew and eventually learned to read, I still thought of books not as words on paper that needed to be deciphered, but as something alive and malleable, stories which I had in one way or another inspired, at least in part, and which could change depending on how I chose to understand them. Now, when I read, I cannot shake off the feeling that I am somehow part of the process, an element of a wheel that turns and in constantly turning creates movement where there might otherwise be stillness, dreams up the stories of my own uneven existence.

I speak to my parents on the telephone and long to be engulfed once again by the green and peppery scents of Australia, by its white, expansive shores and a sky above so vast that it is easy to lose oneself in it.

‘No, I am not lonely, habibti,’ I tell my mother. ‘It’s impossible to feel loneliness here, life is much too immediate.’

‘But the situation…’

‘The Syrian troops have finally withdrawn, mama, and things are quiet again. People have to get on with their lives regardless of the political mayhem around them. Please don’t worry about me. I’ll be fine.’

‘All these assassinations are very worrying,’ my father says once he gets on the phone. ‘Things may get worse, Layla. Syria might retaliate and Israel certainly won’t sit idly by if the situation explodes. It’s all too reminiscent of the events that preceded the civil war. I think you should come back here where it’s safe.’

I understand my father’s concern. The car bomb that killed the former prime minister shook the country and has since been followed by killings of other politicians and journalists brave enough to speak their minds. I’m beginning to see that political stability is not something we can ever take for granted here. Still, I have felt a growing stubbornness in me not so much to ignore what is going on but to keep going in spite of it.

‘Baba, the Lebanese aren’t going to start killing each other again,’ I try to reassure him. ‘The civil war is over for good and things will eventually settle down, I’m certain of that.’

Although in leaving Lebanon all those years ago my parents believed they were securing a better future for me, I find the fact that they now choose to remain in Australia without me more poignant than ironic, especially since they seem genuinely afraid for my safety, more affected by Lebanon’s ups and downs than those of us who live here could ever allow ourselves to be. I suspect also that there is a measure of guilt at play here, the sense so many Lebanese living abroad have that they have abandoned their country just when it needs them most.

I hear my father sigh.

‘I’ll never understand the hold Lebanon has over you,’ he says.

‘But you already do understand, baba,’ I protest. ‘In many ways, it was you and mama who passed it on to me.’

I do not think of myself as particularly defiant or brave. I have at times had to admit that in staying here I am only resigning myself to the inevitable, acknowledging a pull that I know I am unable to resist. And whenever I am challenged to provide an explanation for my actions, either by my parents or by my own misdirected musings, I hesitate. I am weak, I want to say to anyone willing to listen. This enthusiasm you think you see in me is only my heart wavering this way and that.

I see Margo for the first time a few months after my arrival in Beirut. She is on the stairwell of the building making her way slowly but deliberately up to the third floor. She stops and looks straight at me.

‘Hello,’ she says with a smile.

I nod, feeling ashamed that I have been caught staring.

‘My name is Margo,’ she continues. ‘We’re neighbours, you know. You must come and visit me soon. I live in the flat just above yours.’

I look closely at her, the way her head shakes a little as she speaks, her skin, pale and lightly powdered, pulling gently downwards at her chin. She is not Lebanese, I can tell, but I am not certain where she might come from.

‘Yes, I would like that,’ I say after clearing my throat. ‘I’m Layla, by the way.’

Arriving a few days later at the open landing of the third-floor flat with a bouquet of flowers in my hand, I stop to look up at the sky before knocking at the door and hearing Margo’s greeting.

Moments later, I am sitting in a deep blue armchair with my new friend on the floor opposite, her back against the sofa, her short legs stretched out on the carpet, pink felt slippers on her feet, and her ankles, covered in mottled skin, showing beneath the hem of beige corduroy trousers. Even at this first meeting, I see how important this friendship will be in my life, an anchor in a recurring storm.

Margo tells me she married an air force pilot who was killed over Germany during the war. A handsome young man of French aristocratic line, he chose her on a whim, she says, and later made her abort two pregnancies because he believed it was no time to bring children into the world.

I listen to her slow, accented English and watch closely as her grey eyes, small and surprisingly clear for her age, sparkle in the telling, her hair short and white and so thick it curls into clumps behind her rather large ears. The tremor in her voice means I have to listen very carefully to follow and as the lined skin of her face moves with her words she appears ageless, a kind of female Peter Pan, magical and only real when I want her to be.

Pronouncing the name of her husband in the French way, with a long vowel sound in the middle and a silent ‘n’, Margo says John had been the love of her life. That is why she never remarried after he was killed.

‘It was not so much that the men I met later in life were no match for him, you see. In fact, in many ways, one or two of them were better than my John, much kinder to me than he was.’

She pauses.

‘It was just that I could never bring myself to feel as much as I did with him, to go through that kind of intensity again with another human being.’

‘It must have been very difficult for you when you lost him,’ I say gently.

Margo nods.

‘But I managed, as most people did during those terrible times.’

She lifts her cigarette to her mouth and draws deeply on it, her lips pressed closely together over it in the manner of a committed smoker. When she finally lets out a cloud of smoke like a long sigh, I feel myself breathe again.

‘Surely after the war finally ended life was easier, Margo.’

‘I suppose we all felt relief that the end had come, yes, but things were difficult for a long while afterwards.’

She looks up at me with her heavy-lidded eyes.

‘I don’t mean just the physical deprivations, the food rationing and belt-tightening we had to do,’ Margo continues. ‘It was more that everyone was exhausted with the effort of surviving the war and people still had to cope with all of its consequences.’

I try to imagine what it must have been like, to have lost so much and been broken, to have to struggle to put yourself together again when all you really wanted to do was to curl up into yourself and wish existence away. I shake my head.

Margo gives me a questioning look.

‘Don’t look so worried, sweetheart,’ she says, laughing softly. ‘It’s all over now and things did work out in the end. Let’s have some more coffee.’

In spring, during the almost sub-tropical rains that fall over Beirut, I step into Margo’s apartment, shut the front door behind me and feel as though I can finally stop and gather the scattered parts of myself together again. In this sitting room and in this solid armchair, rain descending outside the partially opened window and chaos far behind me, I know I am accepted just as I am, lost and sometimes lonely and looking for answers that elude me.

Margo listens attentively, cigarette constantly in hand, her head shaking slightly or held to one side, her eyes blinking every now and then and her mouth making an ‘O’ of astonishment just at the right moment. And as time passes and the light in the room continues to tilt away from us, our faces falling into half-shadow, she manages to make me feel, imperceptibly and with the help of an occasional murmur, less needy somehow and worthy of her favour.