Rabee Jaber

The Mehlis Report

To Renée and Marwa

~ ~ ~

Saman Yarid has three sisters: Josephine, Mary, and Emily. Josephine was kidnapped in 1983 on the demarcation line between East and West Beirut. Mary lives in Baltimore; Emily in Paris. Mary’s husband is her cousin Hana Yarid. The two of them obtained special permission from the archbishop and got married. They crossed the Atlantic in 1984 and were blessed with four children: Salman, Ilya, Joseph, and Thomas. Across from the Maronite Church in Baltimore, they opened a Lebanese restaurant as well as a bakery next door that sells pita bread and different types of manakish sandwiches: minced lamb, dried yogurt and bulgur, thyme. Emily is a translator at UNESCO. Her husband is French. He’s an administrator at the Paris II University (Assas). They own an apartment in an old building on Rue Georges Saché in the 14th arrondissement, and have two children: Annie and Jack. Blond and blue-eyed, Annie resembles her father, Charles Crubellier; Jack has black eyes and dark skin — the legacy of all the Middle Eastern ancestors he has never known.

These days Saman Yarid directs the Yarid Architecture and Design Agency. The company occupies the third floor of the Istral building, constructed in 1931 and located downtown, in the middle of Beirut’s commercial district. Saman Yarid doesn’t know why he stays — his associates (i.e., his relatives) have all left the city in waves. He comes into his office now to avoid sitting alone in the vast rooms of the family home on Ghandour al-Saad Street (near the Jesuit University, in the East Beirut district of Achrafieh).

“I’m forty now,” reflects Saman Yarid, “and I’ve done nothing with my life.” Heavy burdens lie on his heart — dark thoughts and feelings intensify, then recede. Recently, after the series of explosions and the return of tension to the country, he’s started having panic attacks he cannot understand.

His sister Emily has been writing him emails. When will he leave Beirut, she asks him, and the harrowing life there? Since February 14th, since the explosion in front of the doomed Saint Georges Hotel, she’s been sending him an email every day or two.

And he’s been replying with short sentences in French to her emails. Or he uses that foreign alphabet to write in Arabic. The people of Achrafieh know French better than Arabic. But in French he makes grammatical errors. He prefers Arabic. He spends the morning hours in front of the blue computer screen. He’s become accustomed to reading the local newspapers — and the international ones — online. He reads the news and sends short emails to friends within the city, and to friends outside. Friends and lovers. His short fingers are somewhat plump, even though he watches his diet. He drinks his coffee and looks out the window at the pigeons flying between the buildings and minarets. At the company he has kept on two employees. The tall one is adept at making coffee. The short one is useless. He doesn’t know what she does — eight hours every day.

On the morning of June 2nd, a head peeped around his office door, and her face was pale: “They killed Samir Kassir.”

As he linked the name with a memory of something deep in his mind, his eyes clouded over for a moment. He knew that name. Yes. And he knew the man’s face. Their paths had often crossed, here, downtown, and he had often noticed him. He recognized his face from the TV and the papers. During the protests last March, as the public squares surged with people in revolt, he’d also seen him give speeches. Yes, in a very short span of time, he had seen him quite a bit lately. a strange coincidence. He had seen Kassir here, in front of the fountains by the Municipality Building, after the huge demonstration in the middle of March. And then at Parliament Square (the Place de l’Étoile). And then at the Étoile restaurant in that same square two or three days later — it had been a Friday. Saman only goes to that restaurant on Fridays. Because of the fish plate: rice with stewed fish and onions. An old habit — on Fridays he always eats at the Étoile or the Balthus.

“They blew up his car. In front of his home on Furn al-Hayek Street, the La Rose building.”

This time it was the tall employee who was speaking. He had no connection to either of them. He had inherited her — the tall one — from an associate. He didn’t know who had hired the other one, the short one. Maybe she’d come with the building. He didn’t know. In fact, if anyone ever asked him what he does in this office, he’d say: I drink coffee.

He drinks coffee, and when he gets tired of sitting, he goes out for a walk. He goes out and visits friends. In the middle of the day, he calls one of his girlfriends, or goes home.

“The La Rose building. In front of the Black Tulip.”

At that moment, Saman Yarid recalled that three times in the past month they’d crossed paths. He had twice seen that man on Maarad Street: once standing on the sidewalk in front of the BLOM bank, and once at the entrance to the Caspar & Gambini restaurant. That second time, Kassir was walking out of the restaurant, and its glass door almost slammed Saman Yarid in the face. The third and final time, when was it? Last weekend? He tried to remember. He’d been crossing Abd al-Wahab al-Inglizi Street, carrying a bag of nuts he’d bought from Al-Rifai, here, right by the office — when was that? Thursday? Friday? — and saw Kassir standing in front of the Al Dente restaurant working at his teeth with a toothpick. But no, he wasn’t cleaning his teeth: he was playing with the toothpick between his lips, and he seemed happy. Saman remembered the man’s neatly trimmed gray beard. He remembered his blue shirt, the top button undone, but he didn’t know why he’d greeted him. The man looked familiar, probably from TV, and maybe that’s why Saman had greeted him. And that man who wrote in the papers and gave speeches at the protests returned his greeting and smiled.

It’s autumn now. Saman Yarid crosses Furn al-Hayek Street and sees the Sukleen Company workers sweeping the sycamore figs off the sidewalk. The road turns here, and the trees bury it in thick shadows. His grandmother on his father’s side had often told him about the old neighborhood, when the Achrafieh resounded with flocks of sparrows chirping in the sycamores. Achrafieh was like a forest back then. Saman Yarid crosses in front of the Black Tulip store, following the road, and ascending toward Sassine Square. But before reaching the square, and just after passing the ABC Mall, he turns down a side street, goes into the third building on the right, and takes the elevator to the top floor. He rings the bell, and the door opens. The woman standing in the doorway answers his smile with one of her own. Her name is Cecilia.

It’s autumn now. The ants are hatching and blanketing Beirut’s flagstones, raiding its homes. Emily sends her brother letters. She’s heard about the explosions in Beirut, and is afraid. All the explosions are happening in East Beirut. Her fear redoubled after the explosion in the Geitawi neighborhood. That was the third one in East Beirut. The first explosion was on Furn al-Hayek Street. The second on Rue Huvelin (the windows must have shattered on Ghandour al-Saad Street). And that third one was in Geitawi, where their aunt used to live years ago. Emily writes to Saman from Paris: when, she asks him, will he finally leave Beirut? What is he waiting for? Why doesn’t he just leave the country? When will he go?

“I haven’t decided yet,” he replies. “I’m waiting for the Mehlis Report.”

~ ~ ~

A French magazine lies open on the kitchen table. Cecilia is taking dishes of food out of the refrigerator and over to the other table, in the living room. Saman is drinking a glass of cold white wine and reading an article in her magazine about the explosions in Beirut. The writer has included a brief summary of Lebanon’s long Civil War: the war began in 1975 and ended in 1990; during those years, the city was split in two; one hundred thousand people were killed, and about twenty thousand were kidnapped. Since 1990, conditions have been improving. Solidere, the company founded by former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, has been rebuilding downtown Beirut’s commercial district. One of the largest construction projects of the past few decades, the effort is comparable to what took place in European cities after the Second World War. The project has faced strong domestic opposition, and has not gone smoothly. Nevertheless, the war didn’t start up again. And until the beginning of October 2004, neither did the explosions. The first explosion was taken to be a warning to Hariri and his allies: a picture of the corniche in the Manara neighborhood, near the old lighthouse, with people walking around. Then a picture in the corner of the page: a burning car. The second explosion took place on February 14, 2005. This time Hariri’s convoy was targeted, and the man was killed. A picture of the Saint Georges Hotel balconies collapsing. A picture of broken glass in front of the Phoenicia Hotel. A picture of a charred corpse. A picture of an overturned car surrounded by piles of ash and rubble. A picture of the pit filled with rainwater. A yellow ribbon and bare olive and pine trees that had not been burnt. A white electrical generator. Cameras, and a truck. At the bottom of the page: a shampoo ad. On the opposite page: an interview with a writer from Senegal.

Cecilia is frying cauliflower. She asks where he’s been the past few days. She laughs as she takes a step backward, away from the hot oil.

“The cauliflower’s damp — that’s why the oil’s splattering.”

He sleepily pushes the magazine away. He’s on his third glass. He’s been drinking more these days. She walks over to the window above the sink and opens it to let out the smoke. Sounds from the street enter the apartment: the city and its rumbling; the cars speeding into the tunnel under Sassine Square.

She takes the magazine to the other room. So he won’t get wrapped up in it again. She comes back, tying up her hair and saying something about the Geitawi explosion, that the neighbors’ windows were shattered.

“The explosion on Rue Huvelin broke even more windows,” he says. “Even though the bomb was smaller.”

“Because it’s such a tiny narrow street,” she replies.

“And because the houses are older over there. They’ve got old windows.”

He doesn’t tell her that on the night of the explosion he was entertaining another woman at his place. Nor does he tell her that the following morning — the morning after the explosion — he walked with that woman down Monot Street, which was covered with glass. The street was full of police and army vehicles; as he tread carefully so as not to slip on the glass, the woman clung to his arm. At the intersection by the Jesuit University, he saw men and women sweeping the glass into piles beside the sidewalk. Glass from the café windows, glass from the storefront windows, glass from the nightclub windows. There was glass everywhere: Monot Street was covered. The light shone down on it, and on the street’s black volcanic rock. His lover Liliane was leaning on him and crying. She cried from Monot to Abd al-Wahab al-Inglizi Street, and on to the Furn al-Nasra Bakery and Baydun Way. He bought her a manakish sandwich and a bottle of Miranda from a store by the mosque. She couldn’t eat. He ate the manakish while she drank half the soda. The bells of the nearby church were ringing, and they went in and sat down. There were a few others in the church. When they left, Liliane declared that no one in this city would ever go to Hell.

He asked her why not.

“Because we’re already in Hell.”

He wanted to reply, “What would you say about Baghdad, then?” but he thought it might upset her, and he didn’t want that — she was hard to calm down once she got upset, and he thought she might spend another night at his place if he asked her. Besides, what good does it do to always speak one’s mind?

He kept silent.

“When we’re together where do you wander off to? Why don’t you talk to me? Say something!” Cecilia’s voice comes from behind a tremulous white cloud. Saman sets his glass on the table and looks at her.

He says one of his friends — someone who works at the engineering firm Dar al-Handasa — told him that the Interior Ministry has imported surveillance cameras from Europe and will be installing them on all the streets of Beirut. Not a single alley will be left without a camera. Even the tiniest dead-end streets will have them. They’ll even be putting a camera here, at the entrance to this building.

He laughs and asks where her cigarettes are.

She goes to the living room and comes back carrying a green plate piled with cigarette packs. He picks out a pack of Gitanes Lights. She brings him a matchbox from the stove. He lights a cigarette and says he has to visit the Rizq Hospital for his annual physical.

As she grinds up some garlic with a pestle, she asks him why.

He says he’s been feeling weak, and very anxious at night, though he doesn’t know the reason. Sometimes he wakes up to go to the bathroom, for example, and can’t fall back asleep.

She says it must have something to do with the explosions.

“And with Mehlis. We won’t sleep well until he speaks.”

She stops crushing the garlic. Her mind somewhere else, she looks out the window at the building across the street. Lots of balconies with drying laundry spread out all over the place. A Bangladeshi woman shaking out a carpet. Cecilia, turning toward him, says: “The power was out yesterday, but only on this street, and only in five buildings. It didn’t come back on until the morning. The whole night I could feel people moving around — I could hear doors, water pipes, voices. In this building, and in the other one. And I could see the candles. No one slept the whole night.”

She puts the garlic into a deep dish, then mixes it with sesame paste and water. The smell of tahini fills the air. She gets up, opens the fridge, and pulls a tomato and a cucumber out of a drawer.

The sound of a television comes through the window — the news hour’s theme music. Then a few words lost to their ears. And then a Member of Parliament announces that the “serial killer” roaming the streets of Beirut and planting bombs will inevitably be brought to justice.

~ ~ ~

“I’ll tell you what I saw just as I saw it. Nothing more. And nothing less. I was on the way home. It was after 10:30. The road was dark, but when I reached the streetlights in front of Edouard Kourani’s house, the road was lit up. I saw movement behind the green garbage cans. The ground’s always dirty there. The pavement’s sticky because of the liquid seeping out of the garbage bags. And there’s that derelict plot of land and those iron fences, and the sidewalk overrun by dogs. The neighborhood’s full of dogs. There’s at least one dog for every household. And Bangladeshi women working as maids, and Sri Lankans, and Filipinos (George Estefan’s house has a Korean maid, the Broadwell house has an Indonesian): those short dark-skinned women take their employers’ pets to that sidewalk. Poodles and other small dogs, and a few big ones too — and all of them shit there. I saw something move. I thought it was a stray dog, or a cat in the garbage, but then I saw a man come out from behind the dumpster. At first I took him for one of the Sukleen garbage men, but then I thought: That can’t be. Where’s the truck? Where’s the garbage truck? He hadn’t seen me yet. I was on the dark side of the street, and I saw a red light go on behind the bins. What was that? A battery light. I didn’t think the man was homeless — he looked normal, he was wearing normal clothes. He didn’t look homeless. Then I heard him speak. I carefully drew a step closer and saw another man, as well as a motorcycle and a car. What were they doing to the car? It was a Mercedes: its ignition was off. They were doing something to the car. The sweat was pouring down my neck, onto my back. The cold liquid streamed from me as I stood there, not knowing why — I was frozen to the spot, a statue. What were they doing to the car? And what if they noticed me?

“It was as if the thought left my head and made a sound. The two men jumped onto the motorcycle. I thought I was going to die when I heard its roar. No, I didn’t think I was going to die — the sudden noise seemed to kill me. As if I had been hit in the belly. I felt something explode in my body, inside my stomach, and my legs went weak. As I stretched out a hand to support myself on a tree by the fence of a nearby house, my legs gave out under me, and I fell to the edge of the sidewalk. I sat in a daze in the dirt while the sweat drenched my clothes. The motorcycle and its red taillight vanished down Al-Doumani Street, and the sweat kept streaming from my fingers and hair. My head felt like a mop, all water — water and sweat. The noise was neither a gun nor a bomb. It was a motorcycle. I stood up and wiped the sweat off my face. The silent parked car looked at me like a ghoul. Cars don’t look at people. I know that. But it wasn’t a car anymore. It was a ghoul. I’d lived through the whole war here. I’d never given up my home. We did travel abroad sometimes. But they were all short trips and we always came back. Other than the short trips, I stayed here for the entire war. Here in this house. Our door faced the door of the Riyashi house, and whenever they left we watered their trees for them, and whenever we left they watered our trees. The neighborhood’s old buildings were wiped out. They tore them down, and towers rose up in their place, but our house remained. The house remained, and so did we. We stayed here through every part of the Civil War: the Two-Year War (1975–76) didn’t drive us away; and neither did the Hundred Days’ War; even General Aoun’s war against the Syrian forces couldn’t drive us off. I was afraid, we were all afraid. But what am I saying? The fear back then was nothing compared to what I felt on that night, even though it wasn’t the noise of a shell or a bullet or a rocket or anything like that. There was no explosion. It was the popping sound of a motorcycle engine. But what a fear that was. No, it wasn’t exactly fear that I felt. I felt as if I’d been murdered. They’d killed me on my way home, while I was on the same road I’d been taking every day and every night for years and years and years, ever since I was a little boy. The road had changed a lot in those years, and I’d changed as well. But it was still the road to our house, and I was still myself. The shops had changed too, and the bakeries, and the houses. But it was still the road to our house. Yet that sound burst through the night and cut me in two. The sweat continued to ooze out of me as I looked around, my eyes clouded over — though not because of the beer and the whiskey and the wine. I had started drinking a lot recently, yes, and mixing my drinks. I no longer drank just one kind of alcohol at one sitting. It wasn’t the right way to drink. I never used to drink like that. But it was chance. Before, I used to pay attention, and never let chance dictate my actions. But I had stopped paying attention. It was as if my will were no longer my own. And that white man with blond hair, Mehlis — he was keeping quiet. How long would he stay silent? At first they said until October 21, and then until October 25, and now they’re saying until December. What is this? Are they waiting until every living soul is gone from Beirut? How long will they wait? Don’t they know the truth yet? What’s this truth that can never be told? People are dying while the truth holds its tongue.

“But that night I was all by myself in Achrafieh, the streetlights were shining down on the garbage bins, and I wasn’t thinking about the people who were dying. Or rather: I was thinking about them, and I wasn’t. I stood up and started moving. Slowly, like a slug, like a turtle. As if I were learning to walk there and then. As if I were walking for the first time in my life. I lifted a foot and moved forward. I stopped moving forward — I had to lift the other foot now. I lifted it and moved forward again. One step after the other. I emerged from the darkness into the glow of the streetlights. I felt like I was in an orange grove. But this was no orchard. I could hear my bones rattling. The sweat had stopped flowing now, but my skin was drenched, as if I’d just come out of the sea. My skin felt like a pillow filled with bones, bones that rattled as I moved forward, toward the intersection, toward the street corner, toward my home. How many years had I been taking this road? I’d walked it with a backpack in my school days. Yet on that night I was walking it for the first time. What was this silence? Where were the neighbors? Where were the people of the city? Had they all died? Had they left the city? Where were they? I could hear TVs, and I could see the blue lights of the screens flickering through high balcony doors and half-shuttered windows. I could hear them, and I could smell food somewhere, and I could see dark movements through the windows. But it was as if I were seeing things in another world. And the car — behind my back now — was it still a ghoul staring at me? Would I cover these few feet and survive? Or was it my time to die? Would the ghoul explode and splatter me all over the street, onto the walls and the tree-lined fence of Kourani’s house? Was I going to die? I’ve got to move quicker, to cover this distance, these few feet. But my body was not my own, not anymore. I’d lost it in a moment of distraction. It was as if I’d left it behind, had begun to rise, to hover above it like a bird, near the tops of the pine trees. From up there I could see it moving forward like a cripple: one step, then another, and then another still. My pace was so slow. My muscles had turned to wood, and my joints could no longer bend. It was as if I’d lost them: bone was still connected to bone, but without any joints now. And joints are necessary for movement. Joints and the lipid matter between them. There’s horrible pain if the oil between the joints dries up. Aspirin can’t cure you then, nor can hospitals. My bones had crossed into each other, and so I moved forward like a tree trying to walk. And the whole time I could feel the car behind my back: silent, horrifying, dangerous, cold. Where was everyone? It wasn’t even midnight yet. No one was on the street. Everyone was inside their homes! Didn’t anyone on Monot Street stay up late? Where was everyone? They’d left me alone with this car.

“Once I was inside the house (past the wrought iron gate and the courtyard) and had locked the front door behind me, I thought I was saved. But I wasn’t entirely sure yet. First of all, I was still worried about the dark Mercedes. Second, I felt some pain between my ribs, and in my arms, and some light pain under my left breast. Maybe I was saved — I wasn’t sure.

“In the kitchen I drank some water and washed my face. And the electric light above the sink suddenly filled me with a strange sensation: I was no longer afraid. Suddenly — I don’t know how — the fear left my body. The blood was still beating furiously in my neck, through the artery there, but I was no longer filled with fear. The movement of the man as he emerged from behind the bins came back to me. Then his face came back — I had seen the side of it — and then his voice. He wasn’t a bad man. His voice was normal. Maybe he’d gotten off the motorcycle to piss on the iron bars, imitating all the neighborhood dogs. He’d gotten off and pissed at the edge of the abandoned plot of land, then climbed back onto the bike with his friend. And maybe his friend had also taken a piss. How should I know?

“These thoughts quickly crossed my mind, then vanished. And the fear came back in a single treacherous surge — I again thought the car would explode at any moment. The hair stood up on my neck and my back froze. I felt covered in ice. The car was going to explode. But I didn’t hear anything. Just the sounds of TVs piercing the walls in the city night. And cars passing in the distance: a car driving through Abd al-Wahab al-Inglizi Street, a car parking on Monot. The cars on Monot sounded different ever since they removed the asphalt and paved the street with black stones. The wheels were louder now, passing over the gaps between the stones — the noise rose and resounded through the night. The important thing was that the car hadn’t exploded. And that I was still alive.

“I called the police. I tried several different numbers. I opened the Yellow Pages and circled some numbers in blue ink: domestic security, the fire department, emergency services. I tried a few different numbers. The ringing of the phone in my ears. And then the waiting. The awful sporadic ringing, and then I waited, and waited, and waited some more. I tried another number. Maybe I’d get lucky this time.

“On the fourth or fifth try, a voice finally answered me. They asked for my address and I gave it to them. Ten or fifteen minutes later — I don’t know how long exactly — I heard the sirens. I hadn’t been waiting very long. One expects such things to take some time. If you call a plumber on Monday morning and tell him it’s urgent, very urgent, and you need him to come right away, he won’t show up until Thursday or Friday — if he shows up at all, that is. Even the gas container deliveries are normally late. But the sirens had stopped in front of the house, and the police said they were inspecting the car at that very moment.

“There weren’t any explosives. They found no sign that anyone had tried to rig the car. They said that people were skittish these days, that their nerves were frayed.

“I said I wasn’t skittish.”

~ ~ ~

“I said I wasn’t skittish, and I was convinced I hadn’t been wrong about the car. The police left. I went inside and cleaned myself up, washing my body well with soap. I toweled myself off as I left the bathroom, and continued drying my body as I put a bottle of beer in the fridge. I only drink Almaza beer. It’s the best beer in the world. I drink beer whenever I travel, and I still haven’t found a better one. I finished drying myself off, put on my pajamas, and turned on the TV. A few minutes later, as I drank the cold beer and stared at the TV, I started to laugh. I flipped through the channels to the satellite stations, and stared at the news ticker at the bottom of the Al-Arabiya screen, and then at the Al-Jazeera news ticker, and then at the NBN one. I was looking for the car that had almost killed me. Where was the car? Why wasn’t it on the screen? I kept flipping through the channels. Then I began to laugh. A strange fit of laughter. I’ve never laughed like that in all my life. I kept on laughing for a very long time, occasionally choking on my beer. After the news roundups on LBC and Al-Mustaqbal, the TV settled on the Discovery Channel. They were showing a city, a glass city shaped like a pyramid that was being built in Tokyo Bay. A city made of steel and glass, levels upon levels of glass, with no cars to be seen. I dropped my jaw in amazement. I had been laughing, but I stopped laughing for a moment to drop my jaw. I dropped my jaw knowing full well that I was dropping my jaw just like actors do in the movies when they’re struck by some sight or some piece of news. I opened my mouth and looked at the pyramid made of steel and glass hovering above the water on the shores of Tokyo.

“They moved through houses and shops scattered among the pyramid’s many levels. They passed through clouds of steel and through escalators like the ones in airports. There were also high-tech elevators that resembled cars or large boxes, and that you could control by pressing a button: they carried you from level to level, or from one side of a level to another, moving horizontally or vertically according to your desire. And there were no cars anywhere.

“I started laughing again. Waves of laughter poured out of me: I felt like I was alone in all creation, yet I was never alone. This television was speaking to me. No. All of creation was speaking to me. I didn’t understand what was happening. The whole night was a strange experience. I had been transported from the summit of fear and terror to another, opposing summit. And then suddenly I found faith. That’s it exactly. That’s what I’m trying to say. I became a believer.

“I slept like a bear that night, and woke up refreshed the next morning. Then a drowsiness came over me as I drank my coffee in the office. A strong, sudden irresistible drowsiness. I put down the cup, laid my hand on the desk and my head on my hand, and dozed off. I slept a half hour, then got up and went out. I wanted to walk, to look at the buildings and the sky, to feel my body moving though the streets, passing among the buildings beneath the vast sky.

“I bought some Bulgarian nuts (something I’d gotten used to: they’re similar to Lebanese nuts, except they’re wrapped in these delicious hard shells that break between your teeth). I walked around as I ate the nuts, looking at the cars and people and buildings and shops as if I were coming out of a long coma and opening my eyes for the first time. I once saw a documentary on TV about a guy who was in a coma for eleven years. When he finally woke up, he discovered his wife had divorced him and married another man. His children were treating the other man like a father, and that man was treating the children — who were grown up now — as if they were his own and not someone else’s.

“I walked and thought about what had happened to me the night before. It felt as if it hadn’t happened the previous night, but rather eleven years earlier. Or as if it hadn’t happened to me at all, but to someone else who had told me about it, and I had somehow come to believe that it had actually happened to me. These thoughts kept coming and going as I passed by the Awdah Bank (the Awdah and Saradar Group) in the Bab Idris district, and by Elie Saab’s new building, and by the Besançon School. I stopped there beneath the shade of the school’s lush trees, finished the nuts, then tossed the bag into a trash bin. A bus was leaving from the station beside the school, and I saw girls laughing and a man putting out chairs at the entrance to one of the buildings. Up above, the autumn clouds were drifting by like cotton, calm and white. I looked at the flowing clouds and was filled with a love for life, and a love for this city. My city. As I thought about these things, I saw a man cross my path. Who was he? He was on the other side now, heading up the street, walking quickly on the sidewalk. I recognized him. It was the man I’d seen the night before. It was him, wasn’t it? The man I’d seen on the motorcycle. Then I thought it couldn’t possibly be him. This man was shorter. His hair was black and curly like the other man’s, true. But half the men in Beirut have curly black hair. They all have white faces as well. And two ears, a nose, and a mouth, of course — and a pair of eyes to boot. These delusions caught me off guard. What had caused me to think that this was the same young man I’d seen the night before behind the garbage bins? Where was the resemblance? Apart from the curly black hair and the fact that they’d both passed quickly in front of me, where was the resemblance? I watched him ascend the street in his jeans and black shirt, and it occurred to me that I hadn’t actually seen the man’s face the previous night. I’d only seen the side of his face: a cheek and an ear and the corner of one eye, nothing more. I hadn’t seen a face. I’d seen half a face. And that’s not the same as seeing a face.

“The man had almost reached the top of the road. The road swerved and he vanished, and I could see birds perching on the lofty cypress trees over there, at the top of the rise. Cypresses lined the front of an old house with arches. Windows with green blinds. High faded tiles. Flaking walls. The house had two stories and a long wrap-around balcony with black wrought-iron handrails. Whenever I passed through the area, I always saw that house. It looked abandoned. And maybe it was.

“Time lay empty before me. I quickened my pace. I don’t know why, but I wanted to see the man again. I sped up to keep close to him and saw him turn to the right, descending now toward the distant sea. I stayed after him, leaving the church behind me, and saw him turn right once more to go down a side street. What street was that? It had to be the one with the old house, the house with the arches. That was odd. I stood there and stared at the cars stopped at the red light, not knowing what to do. If I rushed after him into that small street, he’d see me. I knew that street. I could see it from the sidewalk whenever I walked down to the sea or to the Phoenicia Hotel. A small half-paved alley. The green iron door of the house with high tiled arches was at the end of it. That man with the jeans and black shirt — was he the owner of the house? What if I went after the man and called out to him?

“I stayed where I was. The cars coming from Rue Clemenceau stopped at the light. There was a huge red sign in the broad front window of the bank across the street. They’d built that bank in the past few years. It wasn’t old; it wasn’t like that house with the arches. The bank was all glass and steel, and blood-red signs adorned its lobby. I looked at the window and saw myself reflected standing there like an idiot. I saw the old house with the arches, and a cloud passing over the cypress trees, and I saw myself once more. Then I saw the bank guard watching me. Just because I was looking at the city reflected in the window? Was he really staring at me just because of that?

“But he wasn’t staring at me. He crossed Rue Clemenceau and entered a parking lot and started talking to another guard and some men playing cards. The men were sitting by a small bus with a raised open door in the back, and four other men were playing cards inside the bus. A game outside the bus, a game inside the bus. They were playing and eating lupine beans and boiled corn. There were a few similar buses a short distance away, and more card games. Two men were sitting on rattan chairs, playing dominoes in front of a small store with steps leading down below the sidewalk. The entrance was full of old books: it was a used bookstore. There was a school across from it. These were school buses. The bus drivers were playing cards while they waited for the bell to sound. I couldn’t hear the bone dice rattling on the wood, but I heard the laughter. In another bus, a fat driver was sitting behind the steering wheel with his head leaned back and one of his bare arms hanging out the window. He had to be asleep. His belly was on the wheel.

“What was I doing here? I started walking again, toward where the street to the house branched off. I looked out the corner of my eye as I passed it, but didn’t see the man. I stopped and stared down the street. Asphalt, then dirt and grass. I took a few steps into the street. The gate was locked up with chains. He couldn’t possibly have opened the gate and locked it again so quickly. He would have had to open the lock, then get the chains off the bars of the gate, and then — after entering — loop the chains around again and lock the gate. That would take time, and I hadn’t given him all that time.

“Had he jumped the gate and gone into the house? From here I could see the tiles of the entryway. And I could see the balcony tiles as well. They seemed to have been swept clean. Dry leaves were strewn about the garden. There was some briar as well; and empty glass bottles; and a candle stub melted on one of the bottles. But someone had clearly swept the tiles. There was also an electrical cord running through the blinds of a window into the house. Maybe it was connected to a generator. The house didn’t look deserted. But if it wasn’t locked up, and if its owners weren’t out of the country, then why were those chains on the gate?

“In all likelihood the house had been locked up. But someone was still living in it. Who sneaks into a house and starts living there?”

~ ~ ~

Mary calls from Baltimore. She asks him why he doesn’t simply pack his clothes in two suitcases, lock the door of the house, and come to America. She says it’s been years since he’s come to visit. She says the children are constantly asking about their uncle. She says their house is big, and he can settle down there. Or they can arrange a separate home for him if he prefers. The restaurant is doing well, and the bakery makes bread day and night. What’s he doing in Beirut? Every day there’s another explosion, God protect you. Why are you staying in Beirut, Saman? Thomas has grown into a young man, she says, and looks like his uncle. And she says Marta, the daughter of Boutros Yarid, married Tony Haddad. You know, Matanius, who was with you in the club. Mary’s voice comes strangely from beyond the sea. It rings in his ears. It rings through the emptiness of the colossal house. These high ceilings spawn echoes. And apart from those ceilings, today his shoulders are bearing the burden of a head that rattles like a jar full of stones. He drank a lot yesterday. Drank a lot, and danced a lot, and didn’t get to sleep until very late. It’s strange she’s mentioning Tony Haddad now, since just last night Tony had crossed his mind: he was dancing, his breath coming quickly, and the young woman vanished among the crowded bodies, then reappeared. At that moment, he remembered lifting weights in his youth, and he thought about Matanius as he left the dance floor and headed to his table with memories of the Sons of Neptune Sports Club coming back to him. And now here’s Mary talking about Matanius.

Mary says it’s been years since he’s come to visit. And the children have been asking about him. Saman’s mind wanders as she speaks. She’s had this trait her whole life: Whenever she gets worked up about something, it takes her a full hour to let go of it — she just keeps on talking and talking. He explores the emptiness of the house like a butterfly flitting among the massive old pieces of furniture (nobody makes sofas like these anymore, wardrobes like these, tables like these, tall framed mirrors like these). And whenever he returns from his wanderings, he hears her mention the names of her children once more, or the names of relatives he remembers, and those of some he no longer remembers. Who are these people? And why is she talking about them? He had forgotten them when they left the city. He had forgotten them when they left Achrafieh. She says Antoine Dabbana opened a shawarma and falafel restaurant just a block away from their restaurant, on the other side of the church, but it isn’t doing so well. No one has ever seen him light a single candle in the church, she says; and then she says Joseph was coughing a lot this week and that he wanted to.

Her far-off words fail to reach him. They come out of the receiver, true. They fill the empty space of the house with the sound of a woman who misses her brother, true. Yet his feeling of distance increases: that’s true as well. Do her words actually enter his head, his body? His eyes grow heavy, and he disappears into a world of his own. As if it were last night again, as if he were still on Monot Street, dancing in the Crystal Club, drinking cocktails that set his face ablaze. As if he were still in the crowd of redolent bodies, the energy and heat pouring out of them, and he’d felt powerless, as if he had aged years in a single blow, as if he had suddenly grown old, had turned into an old man in the blink of an eye. How had this happened? Where had this weakness come from? He’d been dancing, the music blasting, the woman hovering around him, moving nearer and then backing away again, and when he drew her to him she yielded to his hands, no longer hostile or boorish; she’d become pliant, and he’d felt her limbs relax against his as if she were melting, clinging to him like wax. He could smell her. She’d smelled like cigarettes. He couldn’t stand Winstons — he didn’t know how a woman could smoke such heavy cigarettes. It had seemed to him that he was no longer attracted to her. Not after dancing with her. He hadn’t liked the way she held the cigarette, nor the way she held her glass. And he certainly hadn’t liked the way she talked, her terse and annoying expressions. He generally avoided adolescents. But could this young woman really be called an adolescent when she was putting her ivory arms around his neck and letting her head fall on his shoulders? The strong smell of the tobacco had suddenly stopped annoying him. She’d become one with it, the hot scent of a female seeking a male, and that scent emanated from her and flooded his head. Yet he’d been filled with weakness. What had weakened him?

Mary says it’s been years since he’s come to visit them, and they’ve missed him. She says he hasn’t come since the towers fell in New York, and now things are bad in Beirut, all the car bombs, and they say things are tense in the camps. Don’t you know what that means? Why don’t you lock up the house and come to America?

Saman Yarid laughs, hoping to get Mary to change the subject. He laughs, saying America wouldn’t give him a visa. And even if they did give him one, he couldn’t leave because the Riyashis had beat him to it, and he was in charge of their garden now. And he says he’s lucky they didn’t leave their dog behind as well, and laughs some more.

Mary laughs too, but only for a moment. She goes back to saying things are different this time, they’re more dangerous than before. If they can kill the Prime Minister himself, what’s to stop them from destroying the whole city?

Saman Yarid reassures his sister. He says the news makes mountains out of molehills. You shouldn’t believe everything you hear on TV, he says, those are just exaggerations, and there’s an international commission investigating things right now — that German prosecutor Detlev Mehlis is no fool, and he’ll be presenting his report to the UN in just a few days. There’s a big difference between the local police and the Security Council.

Saman grows tired as he speaks. He wants to stop talking, but he’s afraid his sister will start up again. What if he just hung up? No, he can’t. He’ll just have to be patient.

He stops speaking and lets Mary start over, from the beginning. She says she’s seen the explosions on TV. She’s seen them all. And she reads the Lebanese papers on the Internet. She reads them everyday. Her children print the news from the computer. How can he say Beirut won’t be destroyed? Mother Mary save us all! O our Virgin Lady. Our Father who art in Heaven. Saman, how can you deny this? I saw Hariri on TV. I saw his hand. I saw the scorched cars and the collapsing hotel. No, Saman, my brother, no. You can’t stay in Achrafieh while all this is happening. They’re still planting bombs at night now. But what will you do if they start planting them during the day, in the markets and buses and shopping malls? What will you do? Saman, the light of my mother! Saman — the light of my life, and of your sister, Emily — don’t leave the house at night! Hana called you a few nights ago, but the phone just kept on ringing: no one picked up. Don’t leave the house at night, my brother. Why are you staying there? Why don’t you come to our place? Or go to Emily’s! Why are you staying in Beirut? What’s keeping you in your house? I saw the Geitawi explosion on TV. I recognized the buildings — my aunt’s house. All your cousins are here, in Detroit and in Canada. Why are you staying in Achrafieh? I saw the shattered windows. I saw the old people sitting on their chairs. And the wounded. And the burnt corpse they were carrying, and the ambulance stuck between the fire trucks. I saw it all on TV. And the whole time I was afraid I’d see you as well, Saman. You’re my life, Saman — don’t leave the house at night. I know you. I know you never stay home. I know you spend all your time walking through the streets. What’s keeping you in Achrafieh, my brother? Hear it from my own lips: Pack your things, lock up the house, and come to Baltimore. We’ll book your ticket from here. Don’t trouble yourself with anything, don’t call the embassy, don’t do anything at all. Just get yourself to the airport. For my sake, Saman. The children miss you.

His sister’s heated words don’t upset him. He knows she’ll calm down. She has to let it all out, all those words inside her, then she’ll calm down. All he can do is be patient. He lets her talk while the light pours through the thick colored glass of the high circular skylight. Where can you find a skylight like this in the houses they’re building in Beirut these days? Where? Nowhere: only in the old neighborhoods. And in some of the mansions in the Ramil district. And in the mansions they’ve so carefully restored in the Wadi Abu Jamil neighborhood. These high round skylights. This stately Venetian glass. Light pours through that precious window — blue triangles, green squares, yellow diamonds, bright circles. The light shines through the thick glass and enters the house, the glass slowly saturated. You can see the colors gradually intensifying, radiating. And then — at some moment or another — the light streaming out of the glass bounds back up and fills the ceiling with wondrous forms, pours even onto the ceiling, welling up from the heart of the antique window.

On the other end of the line, Mary’s fear has subsided. Saman can hear other voices now. That’s the voice of his brother-in-law Hana, who’s also his cousin. There’s a third voice too, but he can’t tell whose — the connection is no longer as clear as it was at the beginning of the call.

The sounds of the neighborhood come through the walls as well, even though Achrafieh is usually quiet. There’s never any noise here during the day. At night, if Monot is busy, it gets louder. During the day it’s generally quite calm. There isn’t much noise, and there aren’t many cars. He’s rarely here during the day. And when he does stay, he can hear the sparrows in the oak trees. But he can’t hear them now, the birds. This call has worn him out and made him irritable. They have an oak tree that’s eighty-five years old. His grandfather planted it with his own two hands. He planted it the same year he bought this land. They still have the deed to it. And the date in black ink at the bottom reads: 1920. His grandmother told him the area used to be filled with sycamores and cacti and briar back in the days when his grandfather planted that tree. The Jesuit priests had said an oak wouldn’t grow on the coast, that they can’t take the heat and the humidity, they like high climes and dry cold weather. Don’t cast your wheat on rocks and thorns, Ibn Yarid, they’d said. But his grandfather planted the oak anyway. He planted it here, and here it still lived. The passersby could see it from the street, behind the high walls surrounding the courtyard. And they could hear the birds chirping in the tree’s heart. It towered over the house, over that high pyramid of tiles, and covered one side in shade, sheltering the parlor windows and the dining room. Even in the intense heat at the height of summer, the parlor stayed cool because of that tree. During Camille Chamoun’s presidency in the 1950s, its roots broke through the tiled floor of the spare bedroom beside the dining room. They said the oak tree would crack the walls, and the house might collapse. They wanted to chop it down. But his grandfather refused. He dug a hole outside the house, cut off part of the tree’s roots, and then poured concrete into the hole. His grandmother told him his grandfather once had a dream in which the tree kept growing until its branches covered the whole Jesuit University. In the summertime, when they set the table outside in the lush shade and drank arrack and ate meze and grilled meat and vegetables, he used to tell his friends and relatives about that dream. And when his grandfather grew old, he would get up every morning and sit in the oak tree’s shade. Achrafieh was a desert of cacti and scattered sycamores when he built this house. There was hardly a single building here. Just the yellow stone structure of Saint Joseph’s College (the Jesuit University) out there among the sycamores. And some distance away from it, the Jesuits’ stables, and their monastery. They all knew your grandfather. And your grandfather knew them. There was a spring where the tailor’s shop is now. We used to call it a spring, but it wasn’t really a spring — it was a well. The priests made a pump for it, a copper one, and we used to fill our water jars over there. Then your grandfather laid copper snakes out to the municipality’s water project and we stopped getting our water from the “Jesuit Spring.” All of these houses and buildings that you see now used to be terraced fields of mulberries. And after your grandfather built his home, Ibn Bustrus built a house on the land beside the university. Then the houses began to multiply. Your grandfather also built the “Mexico Villa,” the big stone house past the police station — he’s the one who built that.

After his talk with Mary, Saman speaks with his brother-in-law Hana. The colored light is stretching across the ceiling now, and has reached one of its corners. It dances and flickers, rises and falls like water. He’s been watching this colored light flicker on that ceiling his whole life. Parts of the ceiling have perforations in it — engravings in stone, not molded forms of plaster.

Hana says he saw Samir Kassir on TV, burning in his car, his hand on the steering wheel and his head on his hand. He says he saw the Abd al-Wahab intersection too, and the sycamores by the bend in the road, and the supermarket, and the wall of the Zahrat al-Ihsan School, and the school itself. His voice becomes more animated as he talks. He says he saw the shops, each and every one of them, and knew them all: Beirut hasn’t changed. It’s as if he hadn’t left the city years ago, as if he’d only been gone a couple of days.

Saman Yarid listens to the words that come from America, words that manage, somehow, not to disappear over the Atlantic. He listens as his fingers grow tired from holding the phone, and as his ear starts to ache against the receiver. He listens, and listens, and listens some more. It will be a long day.

~ ~ ~

It’s a day of phone calls. After Mary’s marathon call, he heads into the streets of Achrafieh, making his way toward downtown. He crosses streets tracking patches of shade. It’s true that September 21st is behind us now and that autumn has — in theory — begun, yet the sun still fills Beirut with flame. He’d rather not sweat on the way to work. It usually takes him twenty minutes to get from his house to the office, but today he covers the distance in half an hour. He takes his time. If his armpits start sweating, he’ll be in a sour mood all day. And then there’s the fact that he really likes his shirts. He rarely buys a shirt from a store. He has almost all of them handmade at the tailor’s. He used to have them made at “Saad and Tashman,” and now he has them made at “Iskandar” in the Furn al-Chebbak district. For a moment he thinks about taking a taxi. Then he remembers he doesn’t do that sort of thing. The worst part of the way to work is the empty white plaza in front of the ruins of the City Palace Cinema. The sun blasts that entire space. It’s as if someone has poured boiling water over all the stones: there are no trees in that plaza, and no buildings. But he can still remember the labyrinthine market that was there before the war.

He emerges from the cool shade beneath the Fuad Shihab Bridge and into the fire of the vast white plaza. He usually walks under the cover of the restored Summer Village houses. (You can hear the rippling water among the trees of Molasses Park. But it’s a very small park. It practically fits inside your pocket. It’s not really a park — it just looks like one.) But today he’s late for work, so he crosses the plaza and takes Umm Jilas Street. Then he passes through the Lazariyyah Complex, with its matching yellow buildings and paved red courtyard. He recalls what these buildings were like before the war, how loud they used to be, all the faces there, and all the stuff for sale. There used to be book and fabric stalls in the courtyard. On either side there were restaurants selling falafel, fried eggplant, and shawarma. And there was a manakish bakery in the corner — that space is empty now. His father used to say they made the best manakish sandwiches in all Beirut. If you ate the chard ones there just once you’d never eat them anywhere else again. And it was the only bakery that wrote “chard” on the wrapper. Everyone always writes “spinach” even though they’re actually made with chard — they’re only very rarely made with spinach. This isn’t a country for spinach.

Anyone who makes it to the top of Maarad Street is out of breath by the end of it. From here the road, covered in shade, gently levels off. Perhaps all the alcohol in his body is making him feel even hotter. He’s been drinking each of the past few nights. And he’s also been drinking with his midday or afternoon meal. He drank more than he should have yesterday on Monot Street. And he danced while he was drinking, which made the alcohol course through his blood. He needs to be careful. He’s not a young man anymore. And then there are all the calories in the alcohol. He hates gaining weight. He’s all right as long as he stays under 170 pounds. But his feet start sinking into the pavement if he passes that limit, as if he’s trudging through a swamp. Alcohol puts you in a bad mood as well. It has the opposite effect at first. But afterward — after you’ve finished a long night of drinking — the sunlight starts stabbing your eyes and your head pounds with dark music. No, not music. His eyes are always bloodshot by then, and his brain turns to spaghetti. He doesn’t understand a thing. And if the phone rings his hand strikes out like a snake and he bangs his elbow on the desk. Goddamn whiskey. And goddamn wine. And the arrack and vodka. He has to be careful. The night of the Geitawi explosion — the night of Friday, September 16th — there was a full moon in the middle of the sky. Even though the clouds and smog usually block out the moon (except on very rare occasions), that night he could see it. He saw it before the explosion. And he saw it after. The blast went off at the stroke of midnight, just before the chiming of the old clock in the parlor. That clock’s unreliable in any case. True, the motion of the pendulum swinging behind the tall glass is still quite steady, and the clock hasn’t once been taken away for repairs over the past sixty years. But that doesn’t mean it’s reliable. Sometimes it runs a few minutes slow. Sometimes a few minutes fast. It tipped over in the earthquake at the end of the fifties — his grandmother told him that.

It tipped over against the wine-red armoire made of walnut wood. It came to rest on the armoire and didn’t fall, didn’t shatter. It was a heavy clock: it had been carried to the house from the port of Beirut in a wooden box that looked like a coffin. The porters said it was heavier than a coffin. How could it not be heavier when it was taller than a man and filled with wood, silver, iron, and copper? The earthquake tipped it over, but it didn’t fall. After the earthquake, they brought in an Armenian expert to fix it. During the shelling of Achrafieh in 1978, it started running slow. But it never broke down during the Two-Year War, even though no small number of shells fell onto the neighborhood. During the second half of the eighties, it started running fast. It got worse day by day. His grandmother depended on it to let her know when to prepare the meals, and when to get out of bed, but the clock went haywire: it would chime only once at five o’clock, for example, or five times at midnight. So she would get out of bed, thinking the rooster would crow soon and the city would shortly be waking up from its slumber. But what did she find? The middle of the night.

In 1990, a man from the Burj Hammoud district came to fix it. He wasn’t Armenian himself, but he had learned how to fix clocks from an Armenian. That was a rarity in Beirut. The Armenians usually only passed on their trades within the family. And in extreme cases, such as the absence of children, they passed them on within the community. But an Armenian teaching his trade to a non-Armenian — that had only ever happened a few times. The man who repaired the old clock in the Yarid household on Ghandour al-Saad Street was one of these rare cases. And he did repair it. After that, it only ever ran slow if it went a long time without being wound. The man said the best way to take care of it was to wind the clock once a week. And when no one else was left to do the winding, Saman Yarid inherited the task. The man went back to Burj Hammoud and the clock worked just like any other. Until the end of the nineties. The weak earthquakes between 1995 and 1997 didn’t break it, but in 1999 it started running slow again. And occasionally it ran fast. And sometimes the pendulum could be heard scraping against the light joint at the top. And sometimes you could hear a spring squeaking. But it never stopped working. It was oiled every year. And whenever its glass was dirty, it was polished. And whenever it chimed and the metallic echoes (that sweet ringing sound) reverberated through the halls of the house, from one corridor to the next, beneath the high ceilings, among the framed pictures on the walls, those silent old pictures, looking out at you without really looking. whenever those metallic chimes resounded in the vast empty house, Saman Yarid felt that things hadn’t changed, and that they never would. Wherever he was in the house at that moment, he would suddenly relax: on the English rocking chair or on the sofa. Peace would fill his body.

But the clock’s chimes oppressed him on the night of the Geitawi explosion. After the explosion had convulsed the air and woken him from his light slumber on the old sofa outside (in the peaceful courtyard), the chimes rang hollowly from the depths of the house and oppressed him. Oppressed him? That isn’t the right word. Words don’t say anything. We say “moon,” but that word isn’t the moon. The moon is a white object swimming in the heights. How could a single word ever grasp it?

He had opened his eyes in terror. That horrifying thunderous noise, what was it? Surely an explosion. Surely a detonation. The air had roared and he’d heard glass breaking. He wanted to get up from the sofa, walk into the house, and turn on the TV. Yet before he’d moved from the spot, the moon surprised him at the top edge of the oak tree. And he’d remembered why he was lounging there. He had come out to look at that moon. He had come back from the Starbucks on Sassine Square at 9:30 that night: he’d felt tired and thought to himself, it’s best I go home early tonight. So he’d excused himself from his friends and left. Roger had wanted to give him a lift, but he said no, I’ll walk. Walking at night was a real pleasure. And then there was the moon in the sky. The people sitting outside Starbucks (at the tables on the sidewalk, drinking coffee and Nescafé and iced milk) were watching the cars going by on Sassine Square more than the sky. Yet the customers at the café could still feel the full moon that night. The moon has an effect on people. Every now and then someone would raise their head skyward and gaze at the lofty round disc. And even if you didn’t look up, the white light still stole over you. He said good-night to everyone and left. Sassine Square was like the crown on the summit of Mount Achrafieh. The traffic was thick in the square. A lot of streets come together there. On its other side, the tables in front of the Chase restaurant were also packed with customers. He’d turned away from his friends and quickly crossed the road in the direction of the newspaper stand. He’d passed in front of the building where the Shrimpy restaurant used to be, and where a café had finally opened, across from Dunkin’ Donuts. He’d turned onto the street in front of the entrances to the ABC Mall. The city was buzzing that night. Tomorrow was Saturday: a holiday. The people had come out into the streets. A group of women had appeared. They were young, and were laughing and leaning on one another. They’d gone inside the mall and hovered around the fountain. On the other side of the street, men were lined up at the taxi stand. They were eating warm sandwiches from Sheikh Shawarma and from Falafel Fareeha. The two restaurants were next to each other, and the line of men stretched between them. Juice was dripping from the sandwiches onto the edge of the sidewalk, among the wheels of the parked cars and bikes. The streetlights shone on their hands and mouths, and were reflected in their eyes. As they ate, the sandwich wrappers fell to the ground. They stared at the girls and women coming and going from the ABC. The mall was buzzing too. The restaurants were packed, as were the cafés — even the ones underground. At first, people were angry about the mall being built here, here in the heart of Achrafieh. People were angry because the developers had bought the sports club that used to be here and tore it down to build this mall. Ever since he was in college, since before he was in college, Saman had gone to the Sons of Neptune Club on a daily basis. When he heard ABC had bought the place and that it would be torn down, he’d felt a lump in his throat. But here the mall was: electric, teeming with people, its gorgeous white marble standing against the night. And that beautiful moon filling all the bodies with energy. The city was hopping, as if it hadn’t been rocked by explosions just a few weeks earlier. As if it there weren’t a threat of it being completely upended at any hour. At any moment.

As he walked along the white wall of the Zahrat al-Ihsan School, he felt a wave of despair crash over him. One minute he was up, and the next he was down. What was this strange recent mood? When had this transformation begun? Had it begun with the disturbances? With February 14th? No, it had started before that. But when? At the end of last year? While he was watching the tsunami in the Indian Ocean on TV?

His birthday was December 28th. On his last one, he remembered thinking he’d completed half his life journey. Maybe more than half. The TV had been full of tidal waves and bodies and shattered wood. Naked corpses, swollen, black as coal.

Where had his despair come from? He’d just been enjoying the crowds and voices and laughter in front of Falafel Fareeha, and in front of Chocolat Nora and Hardee’s. The young bodies jostling one another in front of the passing cars had delighted him. People were honking their horns. Light was flowing, yellow and orange, from the streetlamps. He’d been happy, so what was weighing on him now? Was it the sight of the jostling young bodies? The laughing young women in short skirts; shirts that revealed their midriffs; bare, slender thighs.? Was it seeing all this that had so exhausted him? Was it desire? No, it wasn’t merely desire. What was it, then? The women crossed the street laughing and dancing, the headlights of the cars beaming at them. The lights were bright and revealing, and the sound of the horns cut through the night like knives. He looked at their faces fearfully, stealthily. What was this fear? It must have come from his mood — but then where had this dark mood come from? From outside, or from within?

He passed the memorial plaque and the sad olive tree, and then the Black Tulip store. Beneath the shade of the sycamores, he passed an intersection and turned onto Abd al-Wahab al-Inglizi Street. The sidewalk was covered with sycamore figs. They sweep it clear, and more fruit falls. And the more they sweep it, the more the fruit falls. His grandmother said people used to eat those figs in the old days, and they’d liked them better than regular figs.

There were posters of Samir Kassir on the walls. A few days after that man’s car exploded, Saman Yarid had gazed at the La Rose building. He had gazed at it as he stood on high: from the rooftop terrace of the ABC Mall.

From that vantage point, from the tiled plaza in front of the cinema entrance, the building looked as if it were leaning. The air was swaying the stunted potted trees at the edge of the terrace. And the building was leaning. He peered over the edge of the courtyard and saw orange trees below him in the playgrounds of the Zahrat al-Ihsan School. It had been a very long time since he’d seen those playgrounds. When had they planted the trees? He hadn’t even remembered they were there!

Cars passed in front of him on the road. Laughter, the smell of fried potatoes, and lights. Men on a balcony laughing. The giggles of women. Beirut is all laughter on Friday nights. Televisions flickered in the windows. In front of Bread Republic at the end of Furn al-Hayek Street, the smell of rising dough filled the air. At that moment he looked up: The moon was laughing. His despair left him. Whoever dies dies. And whoever lives lives. Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.

He washed up and put on his pajamas. He took his beer and went outside to sit for a while by the potted roses and look at the moon. It was a clear night. There wasn’t much smog in the air, so rare for Beirut. And the moon was full.

He sat down on the familiar sofa. He could smell the old wood and the old foam. This cover, who had embroidered it? His grandmother? The cover was threadbare, but the embroidery was still there. It hadn’t changed. Delicate blue flowers on the fraying white cloth.

He looked at the moon towering over the roofs of the city, higher than Beirut’s towers and the webs of crisscrossing wires. He looked at the moon and felt as if he were swimming in white, swimming lightly. He thought it must mean something. This clarity. This tranquility. The noise that came from beyond the house, from the direction of Monot Street, was loud, and wasn’t. As if this diaphanous light were blocking out the noise. Saman Yarid didn’t notice he was dozing off. Drowsiness and beer, and the weariness of a long day. He dozed as the sounds faded in the distance. The air rustled through the lush leaves of the oak tree. He leaned back his head, resting it on the smooth cushion of the sofa. He fell asleep.

When the explosion went off his body convulsed; the roar and the shattering glass terrified him. He opened his eyes in horror. He didn’t understand what was happening. The fear sent blood thundering through the veins of his neck. His hair stood on end. What’s happening? Where am I? What’s going on?

He wanted to go inside and turn on the TV. It would only be a few moments until he heard the news, saw the images, and learned what had happened. He wanted to get up from the sofa. But his gaze fell on the white disc at the edge of the oak tree.

The oak was a black planet hanging above his head. And at the edge of the black planet, that strange yellow face appeared: Was this the moon? It wasn’t the same one he’d been looking at when he fell asleep an hour ago.

~ ~ ~

He meets Yara at a Chinese restaurant on Foch Street. She’s wearing blue pants and a white blouse with a soft frill on the collar and shoulders. Her dark neck is gleaming, and a silver chain adds to the effect. Her black hair is tied up, and her eyes are radiant. She always calls him whenever she’s about to leave the country, and they always meet at a restaurant. He loves these encounters. She meets him whenever she’s full of life, and some of that incredible energy seems to rub off on him as well. Her mood is never as good as when she’s preparing to take a trip. Her whole being changes, she becomes more talkative, and her pupils shine. Her skin is smooth, lustrous. At the beach, whenever she’s rubbing sunscreen onto her body, he never fails to stare at her stomach. A firm, tan circle of tight flesh quivering beneath her fingers as she rubs in the oil. He’ll never forget the first time he saw her putting on sunscreen.

She orders veal with bok choy, garlic, sweet basil, sesame oil, and soy sauce; and noodles to go with it.

He orders stir-fried chicken with bamboo shoots, green onions, ginger, red chilies, cashews, and soy sauce; and a side order of rice, steamed.

“Are you still afraid of Mad Cow Disease?” she asks him.

“Do you still hate soup?” he answers.

Yara can’t stand soup. She never orders it when she’s with him, and eating it alone would make him uncomfortable. She says she loves soup but hates going to the bathroom. And tofu upsets her stomach.

“We wouldn’t want to upset your stomach.”

They exchange news, and she asks about some of their mutual friends. He tells her Gérard is thinking of moving to Montreal: he hasn’t decided yet, but he’ll probably leave.

“Shame on Gérard,” she says.

He can’t understand why she says this, but he’s not interested, and doesn’t ask her about it. He doesn’t know why he mentioned Gérard at all. He seems tired today. He tells her his ear is hurting, and rubs his ear. She asks why, does he have a cold?

The waiter arrives, balancing the tray. Smells fill the air while colors fill the eyes. The seared half-ripe greens sizzle. The whole-grain rice is white as snow. She asks about his ear again.

“The phone calls,” he replies. He says pressing his ear against the receiver is one of his bad habits.

“You don’t have bad habits,” she laughs, picking up the chopsticks.

Her laughter delights him. It’s just a short laugh, but a trace of it remains in the air: a scent, a light undulation at once perceptible and imperceptible. He notices that customers at other tables keep turning to look at them, time and again, and he knows she knows this.

She asks about his work, and he says it’s the same as always. He takes his chopsticks out of their paper wrapper. He looks outside — at people passing beyond the window — then looks at her and says he’s had nothing but long and exhausting phone calls since the morning.

Emily called after Mary. Emily only ever rarely calls him at the office. She rarely speaks with him at all. Emails are the medium of their relationship, their intimacy. Perhaps it was email that had made them so close — they only really started communicating after she left for Paris. Emily loves to write. And after she went abroad, her relationship with her brother grew stronger.

Yara says the meat’s delicious, it doesn’t taste like meat at all. She looks up at him, her eyes wide as she deliberately chews and swallows. Then she sighs like a contented child.

He asks if her trip will be a long one.

“Why do you ask?” She laughs as she lifts the noodles to her mouth with the chopsticks. She’s great with chopsticks, he thinks to himself. He hears a light whistle of air between her lips.

She says she has five days of work there, but she’s taking five days of vacation on top of that, and if she can she’ll take more, she’s not in a hurry to come back with things like they are, and if she could she wouldn’t return until well after the Mehlis Report is released — she has a feeling there won’t be much to celebrate after the report.

He has the feeling she’s saying something he’s heard or read somewhere before.

“How do they make noodles?” she asks.

“They boil them. Then they set them out to dry on towels. Then they fry them quickly in a little oil.”

“No, I mean how do they make the strings in the first place? What’s the difference between noodles and pasta?”

He says he usually only orders rice.

She laughs. There’s that laugh again. When she laughs he knows that if she’d agree to be with him, to be only with him forever, if she’d agree to that, then he’d. He’d what? He doesn’t complete the thought: he doesn’t like making plans.

She says she doesn’t believe the report will tell why exactly the crime occurred. It won’t say who planned and carried it out either, or who was implicated in concealing the evidence and obstructing the investigation. True, it might talk about how the crime occurred and whether the explosive device was planted on the ground or under it, but it won’t mention the perpetrators, not all of them, not clearly, and it won’t accuse the top brass. How could it accuse them? Such a thing could lead to war. At most it will say where the rigged van was located and how it was detonated and stuff like that. And if it says anything else, it won’t say so clearly.

The smell of sesame oil. She takes a roasted cashew from his plate. She picks it up with her chopsticks, looks at him, says “May I?” and then eats it. Her smooth cheeks. He looks at her, unable to get enough of the sight.

She tells him that scientists have discovered that people who lie a lot do so for biological reasons. Above a person’s eyes, inside their skull, there are two types of matter: gray and white. It’s part of the brain, and all of us have these two types of matter in our brains. But if the white matter is denser than the gray, you lie a lot. White matter helps people lie. They tell lies, but when you look at them you’d never for a moment imagine they’re lying to you. That’s because of the white matter in their skulls. If they had more gray matter, you’d see through the lies immediately. Their faces would give them away — by laughing, or by looking away. The scientists who discovered this might win the Nobel for medicine.

“Unless they’re lying.”

This time she doesn’t laugh. But she gives him a smile, a smile to silence the world, so incredible that it seems as if all the customers in the restaurant are holding their breath.

~ ~ ~

He orders a coffee when he gets back to the office. He unties his shoelaces and settles into the big chair. Seeing Yara has revived him, restored his heart. He needed that dose of life. Emily’s phone call had worn him out even more than Mary’s earlier one. Her anxious tone caught him off guard. As did her words.

“What’s happening over there? The camps are full of weapons? Is it true the army’s surrounded the camps? And that the Palestinians want to occupy the city? Why didn’t you tell me?”

The phone call seemed like part of some dark nightmare to him, its origins unknown. The phone surprised him as soon as he walked into the office that morning — arriving late from his house as usual.

When he had gathered his breath, he asked her who had told her all this, who had she been speaking to?

Emily said her friend Antoinette — “you know her, Antoinette Fayad, we all used to hang out” — had called her today, had called and woken her up and asked her for help because the war might start at any minute. She said she wants to leave Beirut immediately, she wants to come to Paris, and asked if she could stay with her until she found some work and a place to live.

Saman Yarid laughed: “And what did you tell her?”

Hearing his laughter, Emily didn’t know what to say.

“Listen,” Saman said, feeling a weight on his chest. He said that right then he couldn’t remember exactly who Antoinette was, he couldn’t put a face to the name, but that doesn’t matter. What matters is that her friend is half-demented and half-opportunistic. Things are tense in the country, granted, but don’t believe everything you hear, Emily. You’re Lebanese first, and French second. Have you forgotten how people talk here? A few months ago, in March, we said the war was coming, with the Shia fighting against the Sunni, the Druze, and the Christians. Then, at the beginning of summer, after the elections, we said the war would start as it had in ’75: with the Shia, Sunni, and Druze against the Christians. A few days ago, Jumblatt wrangled with Siniora, and again we said the war was coming: with the Shia and Druze against the Sunni and Christians. And now your friend Antoinette wants to set the refugees loose on Beirut so she can go travel around France. She’s not right in the head. Don’t believe what she says. She’s lost her mind.

Saman said half the people in Beirut were like that these days: they’re buying sedatives and antidepressants by the pound. No one’s happy these days except the pharmacists. What can we do? It’s a critical time, but it will pass.

Emily said she’d send him an email.

It was his good fortune that Yara came today. As he watched her eat the Chinese food he wanted to tell her the story about Antoinette and the camps and the phone call. But he didn’t. He let her talk, while he looked on and listened.

They had some Chinese desert after the meal. Seared dried plums were glowing in the ceramic bowl, a yellow layer of rice paste beneath them. He looked at the elegant bracelet on her wrist, and at the chopsticks coming and going. The air coming from the AC was neither strong nor weak. The place was calm. All his tension seeped away. What tension? He felt a boundless tranquility as he looked at her. He forgot the morning’s phone calls.

She asked him what he thinks, what will Mehlis write in his report, will he reveal the truth?

He said Mehlis has two options: Either (1) he reveals the truth; or (2) he doesn’t reveal the truth.

“No, really, what do you think? What have you heard? Your friend who works in the papers — what has he told you?”

“He says what everyone’s saying. He says one thing, and then he says the opposite. No one will know what the investigating commission has to say until the commission has said it. It shouldn’t differ too much from the fact-finding mission that came before it. FitzGerald was from the UN. And so is Mehlis. The problem isn’t what the report says. The problem is what happens to us after that.”

Yara smiled and said she’s not afraid. Her family is, and so are her friends. Everyone who works with her is afraid. One moment they’re happy; the next they’re worried and scared. Even if they don’t always say it. But they do say it. And even if they didn’t say it, she’d know they’re afraid. The tension is obvious. They can’t conceal it. She can tell from the way they move, from their clothes and their hair, from the tone of their voices, from the way they talk and exchange greetings. She often sees them speaking and laughing with the Bangladeshi cleaning lady in the corridor by the bathroom. Since when do they talk to the cleaning lady?

Yara said she’s not afraid, but she feels strangely uneasy at times, as if she were asleep, or acting in a movie. She smiled again and lowered her head. She said the whole thing’s like a detective novel: “There’s a criminal, and there’s a detective going around looking for evidence and detaining suspects. He examines the crime scene and the victims’ remains. He dives with a team into the sea and comes out with pieces of the exploded cars. He gathers all the leads and testimonies and accusations, and compares them. He looks at bank accounts, analyzing the data and drawing conclusions. Then he writes a report, outlining everything he’s found. And if the report is complete, he’ll tell us the criminal’s name at the end of it.”

~ ~ ~

“The appearance of an enormous rat in the kitchen of a house has sparked terror in the Burj Hammoud neighborhood in the eastern part of the Lebanese capital Beirut. Rita Narkiziyan, a neighborhood resident, said the families there are still living in a state of fear. Vicky Shahrouri, a housewife, recently came home from the market, and when she opened the door to her apartment she heard some movement in the kitchen. She said she went in and saw a gray animal that looked like a dog moving about near the refrigerator, and when she realized it was a rat she started screaming for help. Her neighbor on the same floor, Naoum Koukajiyan, said he rushed into the open apartment and saw the rat climb onto a table and leave through a window. An employee from an appliance store on the same street said he looked up when he heard the screams and saw a strange black object moving on the wall: it crawled down and disappeared behind some tin-roof houses. A large number of residents gathered and chased the rat, but it disappeared into a large sewer hole at the edge of a garbage dump; and since the dump is surrounded by walls and wire, and since its gates were locked, the residents were unable to enter. An eyewitness said the rat was the size of a small donkey and had long nails. Hilda Manukian, the seamstress who owns the tailor shop on the bottom floor of the aforementioned building, said she was just going out to deliver a dress when she saw the rat run down the road and disappear. She wanted to scream but couldn’t, as if she had something in her mouth. One of the store’s customers claimed the rat was brown, and that it had hair like a cat and only one eye. But other witnesses said it had two eyes and the only special thing about it was that it was so very large and moved more quickly than your ordinary rat. It is believed that the rat lives in the heart of the mountain of garbage that separates this densely populated residential district from the sea. They refer to the trash heap as Mount Burj Hammoud, part of a dump site created during the fifteen-year-long Lebanese war that began in 1975. Some 150,000 people were killed during the war, which ended with the Taif Agreement, reached in the city of Taif in Saudi Arabia.

“The Burj Hammoud district is predominantly Armenian. Most of its residents are employed in craftwork or manufacturing, and some of its smaller streets are extremely impoverished. The Armenians have been living in Beirut since 1915, their exodus, when they fled the Turkish massacres and the genocide that killed almost a million of their people. Although they have integrated into Lebanese society, they have preserved their language, and they teach their children in private schools or in their homes. The Lebanese police said a foot patrol entered the dump site and inspected the grounds, but found no trace of the giant rat. A director at Sukleen, the firm in charge of all of Beirut’s waste, said that although the rats had been multiplying around the site ever since it was closed a few years ago, the use of poison had recently taken care of the infestation. A source in the company in charge of rehabilitating the dump site and treating its waste stated that the site was free of mice and rats in general, and that what had happened was an isolated incident; he said grass was now being planted on the site, and that they were continuing to treat all toxic fumes with the most modern techniques available, and they had devices in place to monitor the temperature and speed up the decomposition process, etc. But residents maintained that fumes and awful smells still come out of the site every summer. Local newspapers have been reporting the spread of asthma and allergies and eye diseases among children in the area, and also among adults, and have noted that many of the elderly were having trouble breathing at night. But this was the first time a giant rat had ever been seen, and it was spreading fear among the households. It is thought that the rat feeds on waste from the dump site but also on remains from the nearby slaughterhouse in the Karantina (La Quarantaine) district. The aforementioned slaughterhouse, which supplies Beirut’s markets and shops with the greater part of their meat, suffers from an absence of advanced techniques with which to treat the skins, feet, and unused entrails of the carcasses. These are neither treated with chemicals nor buried. Black mountains of flies, mosquitoes, and other insects can be seen swarming around the remains on the bank of the Beirut River, where the slaughterhouse is located. The Al-Nahar newspaper reported that the river was threatening to flood the area’s houses with trash because of the approaching rainy season and the rising water levels. And the Lebanese newspaper Al-Safir quoted sources from the Ministry of Health expressing the government’s desire to seek help from experts in containing the problem and protecting the residents of the adjacent neighborhoods from the flood of trash. It should be noted that an international commission led by the German prosecutor Detlev Mehlis is in Beirut at the moment to investigate the assassination of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, who died along with twenty others in an explosion that targeted his motorcade in the seafront district of West Beirut on February 14th of this year.”

~ ~ ~

The day of phone calls has not yet ended. He had turned off his computer and was getting ready to leave the office when the phone rang. He hesitates before picking up the receiver, then hears a voice he knows and does not know.

“I’m the girl you were dancing with.”

He remains silent for a moment, then presses a finger to his forehead. “You look different on the phone,” he jokes. This is an unexpected call. He wasn’t expecting her to call. Why is she calling him? It’s as if he’s waiting for a response to his thoughts. He hears her let out a nervous laugh, then stop laughing.

“Will you be out at the same place again tonight?”

He tells her he doesn’t go out every night.

“You’ve got my number,” she says, and then hangs up.

He has plans tonight, plans with Cecilia. He’s told her not to worry about making dinner. He’ll pick something up on the way over. Or they’ll have something delivered. It’s hot out. Autumn came for two days, but then receded. Now summer is scorching Beirut once more. We’ll order some food, he said, there’s no need to stand in front of the oven. She said she wants some advice about work. She’s thinking of quitting her job. There’s an open position that might be right for her at Monoprix.

“What position?” he asked.

“We’ll talk over dinner,” she replied.

“OK, over dinner then.”

He heads out of the building and onto the lighted streets. As he’s crossing the Place de l’Étoile and looking at the soldiers standing on the sidewalk in front of the Parliament Building, his cell phone starts vibrating in his pocket: a silver Japanese device with a blue screen, smaller than the palm of your hand. Modern civilization.

“Are we getting together tonight?” Roger asks.

He tells him he’s busy, but he’ll call him if he’s done early.

“Watch your back,” Roger jokes.

“Toi aussi.”

He looks at the receding tables of the restaurant terraces as he climbs Maarad Street. The Municipality is forcing the restaurants and cafés to limit the number of tables they put out on the sidewalk. Each restaurant is entitled to only a certain number of tables. They’re not allowed to put them out wherever they want. Every restaurant has a permit now. If a restaurant owner has only paid for a 50-chair permit, he can’t put 100 chairs out on the sidewalk. Saman Yarid sees the Municipality workers setting up steel and glass barriers at the authorized boundaries in front of each restaurant. And he sees the anger on people’s faces. The restaurant owners had protested in the streets a while ago, holding up signs against the new law. But they didn’t make any real noise, and they didn’t persevere. When was that? At the beginning of March? In April?

As he climbs Maarad Street, Saman looks at the customers scattered here and there among the tables and thinks that downtown is less crowded than it was a year ago. 2005 isn’t 2004. Beirut was full of tourists — Arabs and other foreigners — in the summer of 2004. Bin Laden had closed the doors of the West for Arabs from the Gulf, and they had flocked to Beirut in the tens of thousands, in the hundreds of thousands. They had filled the hotels back then. There wasn’t a single vacant apartment in the city. The restaurants were teeming with people, night and day. The beaches were so packed you couldn’t see the sand anymore. The mountain roads were jammed with cars every afternoon and evening. The rental agencies were buying cars from the port of Tyre and ordering new ones from across the sea. The villages were inundated with festivals. Dancing and singing. Wealth and prosperity. The resorts of Brummana were buzzing with activity. The nightclubs of Maameltein and Kaslik and Monot did not sleep. Back then, Maarad Street at 3:30 in the morning looked like the Day of Judgment: the Parliament clock tower was as round as the moon, and smoke rose from the hookahs and enveloped it in a halo, like the edge of an eclipse. Laughter, noise, scents. Perfumes, flirtation, and smiles. A young man was pressing a young woman against a wall in front of the Seattle Café. The name of the place has since been changed to Masaya al-Balad, “Country Nights.” The restaurants change their names with each passing season. It’s not good. You lose your bearings that way. They ought to carve the old names above the doors. But who cares? No one cares. Why is the image of that young man still in his head? A whole year has gone by. Then Saman remembers he had not actually seen any of it. One of his friends had told him about it. His friend’s manner of speaking had etched the image in his mind. By the mosque, he had said, against its wall: she was Lebanese; he was not.

Saman Yarid rubs the collar of his shirt, then smells his finger. The scent of his cologne, Cacharel; and the opposing smell of sweat; and that of cloth. All of it mixed together into a single familiar smell. He cannot detect a trace of Yara’s perfume, J’adore, but he can still feel her strong embrace through his entire body.

Yara had parked her car underground, beneath the small fountains by the Municipality Building. The two of them walked side by side from the Chinese restaurant on Foch Street to the fountains. As they were leaving the restaurant and she was thanking him for lunch, she leaned against him and held onto his arm. She seemed to be lurching a bit as she walked, although neither of them had drunk any wine. He thought it must be her high heels. Her lovely weight on his arm. The whispering in his ear. And her perfume. She did this every time they left a restaurant. Yet after a few steps she put a finger — the length of a finger, that is — between her body and his. She stopped for a moment in front of the Timberland store and pointed at some things in the window: a fleeting movement. Then they went on their way, as did their reflections in the storefront window.

She seemed nervous while they waited for her car at the parking lot entrance. He didn’t know why. The green Range Rover emerged from the belly of the earth. It stopped in front of her. The parking attendant got out and stood by the open door. She quickly embraced Saman. He could feel the breath leave her chest: the embrace was full of emotion. Her chest pressed through her ribs, then receded as she said goodbye:

“I feel like it’s going to be a long trip this time. As if I’m not coming back. It’s strange. I feel like I’m going to be gone for a very long time. I’ll miss you, Saman. I’ll be thinking about you.”

She got in the Range Rover and handed the attendant a lemon-colored banknote, then settled in behind the steering wheel. The young attendant in the uniform lingered by the door of the car, standing there and thanking her. Then he finally got the message and moved along. Yara’s face suddenly seemed so far away. She nodded her head as she looked at the stream of cars in front of the fountain. Rue Weygand was full of cars.

“Make sure you behave in Amsterdam.”

The cell phone starts vibrating again in his pocket. This time he doesn’t answer. He looks at the number and doesn’t answer.

He passes by the BLOM bank and the new sidewalk behind the buildings on Maarad Street that descends to the Place de l’Étoile. There aren’t many customers on this side of the street either. Spotlights light up Roman columns underneath the street. Crowns of sculptured marble. Thresholds. Grass sprouting among the stones. He’s seen the plans for this park. And the long winding path among the ruins. When will this park be completed? The view will be different on this side once it’s finished. The fish market was here before the war, behind the Banca di Roma. He used to come here with his father. The bank has since moved to Al-Omari Mosque Street. Its building collapsed during the war. Or rather, half of it collapsed, and the Solidere bulldozers removed the other half. These columns were discovered beneath the debris, after the rubble was dug up and dumped into the sea. The plan had been to put up some buildings here. The Roman columns changed that plan. Saman has the very first map of the ruins in his office. And he has the amended maps as well. He recalls spreading them out on his desk, beneath the white light, and comparing them to one another: a labyrinth of blue lines, and beneath it another labyrinth, like the first one and unlike it. He recalls folding up the maps and heading out to the lighted street. The humidity was glistening around the tall streetlamps, beneath the arches of Maarad Street — high arches from the French Mandate period. His grandfather built three buildings on this street, in the old days. His grandmother said Youssef Aftimus was his only real competition in all of Beirut, the same Aftimus who designed the Municipality Building: he won the right to design that building because he was a friend of the French High Commissioner, who used to eat at his place every Sunday.

The headlights of the cars blind him. As he crosses the broad sidewalk in front of the restaurant at the bottom of the Lazariyyah Complex, he can smell the markouk flatbread. And he can smell the shish barak as well: meat and onions and sumac; dough boiling in yogurt. He sees a woman dressed in white sitting in the restaurant window. She’s kneading the dough and spreading it onto baking sheets. She throws it into the air and catches it on her bare arm while gazing at the passersby outside the window. That woman looks like a fish, Saman Yarid says to himself.

He turns at the corner in front of the DHL window. A dark-haired woman with a freckled face is behind the counter. Cars exit from the parking lot beneath the Lazariyyah Complex. He waits for them to pass, then continues on his way. The streetlights trace geometric forms on the oval dome of the ruined City Palace Cinema. When was that dome built? At the end of the sixties? He remembers the wall that used to be beneath the dome. They demolished it after the war, and so the columns became visible, as did the empty space beneath the dome. Through that empty space, the dome looks as if it’s hanging in the air like a flying saucer. During the war, in a moment of cease-fire between the two sides of the city, he had gone there with some friends and discovered people were living there. Poor people, and people who had been displaced from distant regions. Lebanese, Syrians, Palestinians, Sudanese, Somalis, and Egyptians. A whole host of dialects. The cinema had been transformed into a residential complex. He had seen Mercedes and Peugeots parked there. And he had eaten a sandwich in a restaurant that, along with its building, has since been destroyed, gone now, existing only in his head. Could he recall what he’d eaten there? A sausage sandwich. It might have been the most delicious sandwich of his life. He can still remember the hot sauce. The spices. The garlic. The redolent meat. And the napkin around the sandwich. The Yarid Architecture and Design Agency had finally taken part in a competition to determine the future layout of this part of Solidere City, but the Brazilian plans were better. The oval dome adorned in glass and mirrors and metal and silver had enchanted him. The drawings had shimmered. In front of the dome, the empty white plaza had stretched between the two parallel streets, but it’s an entirely different plaza now: elevators and strangely shaped trees; stores on different levels, and marble passageways; blue neon lights, and purple ones, and yellow ones too. The lights were designed specifically for this plaza.

Underneath the Fuad Shihab Bridge, his cell phone vibrates in his pocket. He stands beneath the bridge and turns around to look at the dome, and then at the Lazariyyah Complex and the four minarets of the Mohammad al-Amin Mosque. Orange light on the celestial dome. The giant mosque with its symmetrical minarets dominates the space there. The Virgin building looks tiny in the distance, yet its white stone and the way it’s lit up in red somehow push it into the foreground, into the great void in front of the buildings, like something jutting out of a painting.

Across the void between the buildings, the Saray Mosque (the Mansour Assaf Mosque) can be seen, as can the Municipality Building. The spotlights lift up the Municipality, as if were no longer connected to the ground. Its Ottoman style and its broad façade give it a two-dimensional quality, as if it were a picture, as if it were a building on a large flat screen, as if it were the screen itself. If you stop on Hussein al-Ahdab Street (in front of Second Cup Café or the Étoile Suites Hotel) and look at the Municipality Building, you feel like you’re looking at a picture. The windows. The three floors. The jagged teeth jutting out from the edge of the roof. That symmetrical geometry. The polished yellow stone. His grandfather admitted that Youssef Aftimus had talent. The two men weren’t friends. But they respected one another. His grandmother once said that wasn’t common anymore: respect was a rarity these days.

The glass building — past the building with the green dome, and behind the Virgin — formed the edge of the plaza. It was only completed a year ago. Tall. Blue. Its raised entrance increasing the feeling of height. He can’t see its pool from here.

He doesn’t know whose number this is. Should he answer, or not? He looks at the lights on the green dome. That used to be the Opera Cinema. He had seen countless movies there, long years ago. How many lives does a person live in a single lifetime? After the war, he climbed up a hill of dirt and grass and iron and shattered wood, and he saw — inside the building — that a fire had swept through the hall. The seats were charred, and the walls were black. Yet the backs of the seats had not been destroyed. Black, square, lined up row after row, covered in white lines that looked like melted wax. They looked like rows of tombstones. A flock of pigeons behind the last row of seats flapped their wings and took off. They flew through the stagnant air and out the shattered windows. The sun was blinding in its whiteness. The pigeons, black as coal against the sun, looked as if they too had been burned.

His cell phone stops ringing.

~ ~ ~

“Listen, Saman. I call you, but you don’t answer. You look at my number, and you don’t answer because you don’t know who it is. I’m calling you from this side. From a place where no one calls anyone, where no one asks for anything. Well, in a way we do ask for things, but we’re not really asking. We ask for less than we used to. It’s better here.

“I call you, but you don’t answer. I want to tell you things. I have so many things to tell you. I’ve said it all many times. And many times, when I’m unable to speak these things, or when I simply don’t speak them, Saman, I sit and write them down on paper. I write and write and write. At first it was hard to write, but gradually I learned. I learned slowly, but I learned. Understanding comes with time. I came to know what I would write, and what I wouldn’t. I began to write, and write, and write. I’m not the only one who writes, but when I write I’m alone. There are things I want to say, things I want to tell myself. And things I want to tell you. I’m not alone. And neither are you. But there are times when we don’t know that. Most of the time we don’t know it. Most of the time people think they’re alone. They’re not alone, but they think they are. And because they think they’re alone, they come to be alone.

“I call you, but you don’t answer. You look at the number and you don’t answer because you don’t know it. You should see eight numbers on your phone. When the call is domestic, you see eight numbers. When it’s international, you see more. But it surprises you to look at the tiny blue screen and see only two or three numbers, or just one. What is this? you ask yourself: this new Japanese cell phone can’t already be broken. And before you can pursue your thoughts, the ringing stops. Wrong number, you think, or the lines must be crossed, and you tell yourself you’ll call the company to ask them about this, but you never call, and you never ask, because you’ve already almost forgotten it, because you’re not really interested.

“I call you, but you don’t answer. I want to ask you why you’re not interested. You look at the number. There are eight digits this time, but you don’t know the two-digit area code at the beginning. The code for cell phones is 03, Beirut is 01, Sidon is 07, Jounieh is 09, Mount Lebanon is 05. And after the area code, you see the actual number of the person who’s calling. But this area code confuses you: Where’s this person calling from, who are they, and why are they calling? You’re confused for a moment, you look at the green dome, there where the cinema used to be — the movies, and the popcorn, and all the whispering, and the orange juice, the bottles of Crush, the chocolate bars in silver wrappings. You look at the dome and you know that the building isn’t the Opera Cinema anymore, it houses an insurance company now, and on the wall there’s a marble plaque with dates — when it was built, when it was renovated — the building isn’t a movie theater anymore, although it used to be one — and on that marble plaque they’ve written the names of the owners, old and new, beside the dates, but they haven’t written that it used to be a cinema.

“I call, but you don’t answer. You hesitate a moment in front of the number, and then the phone stops ringing. And you forget that it ever rang. In a man’s life the phone rings a lot. So why should he care about every single phone call? What happens if you don’t answer? Do you remember a time when you ever answered the phone and it changed things? You don’t answer. I call you, and you look at the number, but you don’t answer. It’s as if you don’t care. Why don’t you care? I’m not just talking about the phone. That should be clear by now. I’m talking about a lot of things.

“I want to speak with you. Do you know that I want to speak with you? But how would you know? I tell myself that you know. When you write, you discover things about the world that you never knew before. When I started writing more quickly, I felt strong. But then the feeling vanished. And I wanted to rip up what I’d written. In the beginning I was slow. Then I became quicker. And when I came to believe that I was good at this, I soon discovered I wasn’t. So I stopped writing. Understanding comes with time. I started writing again. Sometimes more slowly, and sometimes more quickly. But now I feel joy when I write. Not exactly joy. I feel that I have to write what I’m writing. I wanted to tear up the older pages I’d written, but they said that was forbidden. All pages are kept in the archives. It’s forbidden to tear up anything. It’s the law. It doesn’t matter. I don’t think about those pages now. I’ve started writing what I need to write: rest and peace of mind only come to me when I write. I’m not alone. But when I write I am.

“Listen, Saman. I’ve got things I need to tell you. I’m not calling you because I’m the only one who wants me to call. I’m calling you because you want me to call you as well. You don’t fully realize it, but that’s what you want. I have things to tell you. What’s this empty life you’re living, Saman? Why don’t you make something of your days? It’s all well and good for you to walk through the streets and mentally register the buildings and the sky and how they’ve all changed. It’s all well and good for you to swim and watch your weight, to not let yourself go. That’s all well and good. But it’s not good for you to waste your time reading newspapers and aimlessly chasing after short skirts. How many women have you known? What good has it done you? Why don’t you open a book and read something of value? One has to grow. That’s our task. To become more beautiful. To become better. To keep improving. But you, what do you do? Besides wasting your time with newspapers and dinners and women, what do you do? You drink like a camel, you never read anything worthwhile, and you neglect your work. It’s as if you don’t care.

“Maybe it’s not your fault. Maybe you were born in an inauspicious hour. A city thrives for a time, then collapses. A house flourishes for decades, then falls. The city is falling now too. Your problem is that you were born at a moment when the house is collapsing. The aristocratic district is reeling. The blows of time are hard. The elderly bow their heads: old bones and walking sticks, skin overrun by wrinkles. On Abd al-Wahab al-Inglizi, from one end of that street to the other, the houses are teeming with the elderly. Their heads crowned with white hair, their garages full of fancy cars that never move. And those small dogs that sound more like cats: dogs with birth certificates, only ever eating from sealed cans, only ever eating small portions. Dogs brought to Beirut from beyond the sea.

“You were born in an evil hour. The old aristocratic house, the whole district. The city’s no aristocrat, but it too is passing through dark times. It’s not your fault: time’s the culprit. How can you find a story for your life, how can you write one, when you’re in this city at this hour? Beirut, suspended, waits for the unknown, and you too are in suspension. ‘Where’s his life story?’ we ask. Where’s his story? It’s a drop in the sea. Beirut has one and a half million souls. Beirut’s a ship, a ship on the sea, and the sea could rise up at any moment. Its location is to blame. We can’t lay the blame within it: it’s not in the city, and it’s not in you. The place, rather, is to blame. And the time. And then you’ve got the Anatolian Fault, the chance of an earthquake at any moment. It’s been expected for years. The plates beneath the earth’s crust are moving. And if one giant plate slips against another, the earth moves. Streets crack open. Cities collapse. The sea comes in: it draws back first, then rushes in. All these houses, all these buildings, all these gardens — in an hour all of it can end. The Anatolian Fault stretches from Istanbul to Beirut. More? No, that’s enough. A real possibility. Any moment now. The earthquake. And after it the flood.

“Listen, Saman. I call, but you don’t answer. I want to talk, I want to hear your voice, and I know you want to hear mine. You want it and you don’t. You’re split in two. You’ve been like this for years, not caring, not interested, split in two without knowing it. I call, but you don’t answer. And even if you did answer, would I speak? Would I open my mouth? Or would I deny myself? And if I spoke, would you hear me? You’re not on this side, and I’m not on yours. I see you, but I don’t touch you. When you’re sleeping, though, then I touch your head.

“I want to tell you about the Anatolian Fault. No, that’s not what I want to say. It’s part of what I want to say, but not all of it. I see you reading the papers and putting together the different stories and trying to understand. You’re trying to figure out what will happen. You remember you’ve seen the man several times sitting outside, on the terrace of the Étoile restaurant. And you remember you saw him sitting inside once too, with people whose faces you recognized. The motorcade that exploded in front of the Phoenicia, just past that hotel, you saw it leave from here, from this plaza, this square, the square right by your office. You stopped here and looked at the soldiers and policemen and parliament guards, and at the pigeons. You saw the motorcade head off, not knowing that it would explode a moment or two later — a moment more or a moment less, what does it change? The motorcade explodes and the cars catch on fire, and the explosion launches one car straight through a wall and into the depths of the sea. The motorcade explodes and a black chasm appears in the road, and the city falls into it. The whole country falls into the chasm. You look at the papers, at the television, at the edifices, at the fountains by the Municipality Building.

“What do you see when you look at things? Do you see anything at all? There’s alcohol in your blood, you stay up all night, and you don’t even cook. Why don’t you buy some meat and vegetables and milk and cheese and go home and cook your own meals? Why do you only ever eat restaurant food? If you have home cooking, it’s always something one of your girlfriends has made. And if you’re alone, you order from a restaurant or a bakery. You don’t make your own food and you don’t care. You’re split in two, but you don’t know it.

“Listen, Saman. I call, but you don’t answer. I see you standing at the demarcation line, beneath the Fuad Shihab Bridge, looking at the overhauled buildings. You think back to the old days, and do not think. You stand there at night. The cars pass by, the city is full of lights. The cars race onward. I see you and I know you’re calling me, calling on me to call you, and yet you’re not. You want me to, and you don’t. Confused, suspended. I look at you and picture your confusion, your state of suspension. Maybe I’m the one who’s confused. But how could that be? Talking is difficult. Writing even more so. At first we don’t understand. But after a while. ”

~ ~ ~

Saman has two hours before he’s meeting Cecilia. He showers and puts on some clothes, then opens the garage door behind the house and flips the switch. The white light shines on the gleaming red Dodge. It’s a 1972 model, but looks as if it just came out of the factory in America an hour ago, as if they had just brought it here wrapped in silk. There’s not a scratch to be seen on the paint. The leather upholstery is white as cotton. The thick wooden dashboard is plated with chrome that sparkles like jewels, and the steering wheel is silver-plated. It’s like sitting in someone’s living room. They don’t make cars like this anymore.

He stays in the car for a quarter hour. The engine sounds clear, like the rippling of a brook, the song of a stream: that engine makes music. A quarter hour to keep the battery charged. He doesn’t often take this car out of the garage. He does take it out, but not very often. He takes it on excursions outside of Beirut. And sometimes he takes it out at night: the traffic’s not too bad then, so he takes it out of the garage and drives out of the city for a few hours, into the bowels of the night, and then returns.

He turns off the motor. He turns off the light and locks up the garage. He grabs his cell phone and heads out. He wants to take his time. He doesn’t want to rush. Should he pick up some food on the way to Cecilia’s? Or should he wait to decide? He’ll go for the easiest thing: delivery.

The women who work at the Bread Republic are sitting on the sidewalk in front of the bakery. They’re all wearing the same white bakers’ uniforms, and they all have similar faces, as if they were sisters. The smoke from their cigarettes rises above their heads, above their hats and above the hair that sticks out beneath their hats — black hair, or blonde, or red. The smoke fills the air in front of the bakery. Inside the lighted storefront window, loaves of bread are lined up on the shelves: all different colors and shapes, white flour sprinkled over them. Light streams out from the inside, casts itself onto the sidewalk and street. On their high posts the streetlights are all dark. Most likely a power outage. Or some unannounced rationing. He thinks about going inside and buying a few of the dark round herb and black olive loaves as a gift for Cecilia, but then decides against it. He’ll get something else later. He’s only just starting out, and the bread is hot. He doesn’t want to sweat.

In front of a pet store he sees a brightly colored parrot screeching in its cage. Why’s it screeching like that? Who would ever take it? Or is that its way of singing? A cage full of cats is right beside it: small white ones that don’t really look like cats. And beneath them there’s a cage full of hamsters. Two young men are taking the cages inside. Aquariums are illuminated in the shop’s window: colored fish swim behind the glass. The adjacent vegetable store is also bringing in its goods and closing up. Bats can be seen beneath the sycamore trees. They come out at dusk, just as they do early in the morning. Whenever he passes by here in the morning, he sees the bats emerge from the sycamores and then disappear back into them. Do they live in the trees? It’s dark here. Past a bend in the road, the light of the streetlamps returns. Countless streetlamps, lots of cars, and young men and women holding banners and candles. And candles on the ground in front of the La Rose building. He takes a detour. He turns at the Abd al-Wahab intersection and starts ascending, then turns left onto Baroudi Street, then left again. Chance brings him to the Bristol Patisserie. He goes in and buys a dozen assorted little cakes. He knows what Cecilia likes, and makes his choices accordingly: ground hazelnuts; whipped cream; chocolate, but no fruit; coffee cake. Cecilia’s favorite flavors.

This humidity in the air. Will summer never be over? Beirut’s summer is long, endless: the mosquitoes are hatching once more. He sees a policeman inspecting a blue Datsun parked in front of the Mexico Villa. He sees a woman loaded with heavy bags leaving Monoprix. Where’s her maid? From the looks of her, she has a maid. So why is she shopping alone?

Cars pack the broad sloping road in front of the ABC Mall. Their horns fill the air with noise: traffic is backed up. Angry faces, and laughing ones. He steps onto the sidewalk, his gaze directed at the café high up on the ABC terrace. Before he can lift his gaze even higher — to the sky — the cell phone in his pocket vibrates. He shifts the box of cakes to his other hand and pulls out his phone. That strange number again! Who is it? The ringing stops just as he tries to answer. He wants to answer the phone and speak. But the line is gone, and there’s nothing left but the mournful dial tone.

Delicious smells accost him in front of the shawarma restaurant, and in front of the Viva Taxi office, and then from the falafel place. Inside the taxi office, the drivers are gathered around a wooden board they’ve set between two chairs. As he passes by, Saman Yarid sees a can of hummus, a plate with sliced tomatoes, and a platter of small sardines. Fish? At this hour? They’re drinking arrack, and they all — very unusually for them — have serious looks on their faces as they eat. Where are the bursts of laughter? Saman feels some pressure in his chest. There’s that pain again. He needs to go get his annual physical. Heart disease is hereditary. High blood pressure is hereditary. Diabetes is hereditary. You’re born with diseases lurking inside you. He needs to go get his annual physical.

He looks at his watch: he can walk around a bit longer. His watch is from Naoum Mouzannar. They’re his relatives. They have a store in the Bab Idris district beside the MEA office, and another one at the intersection of Weygand and Abd al-Malik Street on the ground floor of the Municipality Building. They didn’t start out making watches. The grandfather of the family, Naoum Mouzannar, was Beirut’s most famous jeweler in the old days. Saman Yarid’s grandmother said that Ibn Mouzannar provided the women of the Khedive’s household with sets of gold jewelry — Khedive Ismail’s wife wore diamond necklaces made by Naoum Mouzannar’s own two hands.

When he walks out of the elevator, he finds Cecilia waiting for him. She’s standing in the wide-open doorway to her apartment, her laughing face washed in the yellow electric light. She’s brushed her black hair, straight and long, to one side. Her neck is pure white, and she’s wearing a gleaming black dress he’s never seen before. She seems tall: high heels, and her long dress. The color of her hair: it’s actually brown — this is the first time she’s ever dyed it black. He says she looks like a new woman. She laughs as she pulls him into the apartment.

He asks her if she wants to go out.

No, not now, she says.

They start laughing for no apparent reason. She laughs first, and then he takes it up. This kind of spontaneous overflowing laughter doesn’t come often, but when it does come he always tries to let it wash over him. He loves immersing himself in Cecilia’s laughter. The box of cakes remains on the small table in the hallway. Cecilia draws him to her bed.

He feels his heartbeat quicken as he embraces her. The palpitations are not what concern him, but rather the murmur. He seems to hear a murmur. And there’s that light pain. But the pain presently recedes. He gets on top of her, but she pushes him away, laughing, and stands up.

“You haven’t said congratulations.”

She takes off the dress and throws it on the chair, then flops down beside him. He whispers something inaudibly. She knows he doesn’t want to talk now. Cecilia knows him well.

As he strokes her shoulder and kisses her back, he feels his heartbeat take on a steady rhythm, one it hasn’t had in years. Desire wells up in him, and her pitch-black hair shimmers. He feels an immense calm come over him. Her alabaster skin. The familiar freckles. Her fingers on his side. Their bodies embracing. They merge, melt into one another. This peace he’d lost, where is it returning from? He forgets the world. He forgets where he’s spent that day, and where he’s spent all the others. He forgets Yara and the Chinese food and the overwhelming emotion of their embrace in front of the parking lot by the fountains. He forgets all the roads he crossed from Ghandour al-Saad Street to this room. He forgets Mary’s phone call, and Emily’s too (did all that happen in a single day?), and he forgets the unknown phone calls. He plunges into Cecilia’s body as if into a stream, losing himself within her, looking for more time, for a little more time, for just a bit more time within her, he doesn’t want to leave her now, he wants to sink into this woman, to sink deeper and deeper and deeper. And all of this just because she dyed her hair? All of this just because she was standing, aglow, in front of her door and waiting for him, gazing at him, gazing with large eyes, her ivory neck gleaming between her black hair and the black folds of her dress? Had he not known her all these days and weeks and months? Had they not sat for long hours in front of the TV, after the bedroom, and before the bedroom too, like any other man and woman, even like a husband and wife? They’ve been seeing each for a long time, casually coming and going in each other’s lives, so what’s happening to him tonight? Where is this strange feeling coming from?

She whispers something, utters words while moaning in his ear. He doesn’t hear the words, but now he can feel her fingers unfolding, stretching across his shoulders, her two hands snatching at his bones, clinging to his body. Why is she holding onto him like this? Where is she? He’s only heard that overflowing laugh on rare occasions. She tends toward melancholy, Cecilia. She has not lived the life she asked for. She had loved a man. And the war killed him. A shard. A shard smaller than a lentil. The bomb that exploded in front of the car did not harm him. He was getting out of the car when the bomb went off. The bomb itself did not harm him. But a piece of iron smaller than a chickpea pierced his heart.

What’s she whispering in his ear now? Saman can’t hear Cecilia’s words. She falls silent. Neither of them is speaking now. They melt into each other like wax statues. Like soft ivy they intertwine. This room, at this hour, is outside the world. This isn’t Beirut.

They whisper to each other. It’s quiet now. The curtains do not move. Air enters through the blinds, they can feel it, but the curtains do not move.

~ ~ ~

He asks about the job she was offered. “It’s no longer offered,” she says. He asks what happened. “You’re sleeping with the new kitchen manager of the Achrafieh branch of Monoprix,” she replies. She laughs as she pulls up the sheets to cover her stomach. Air sneaks in through the blinds; and with the air, the sounds of the city. He asks when she’s starting her new job. She says she can start the day after tomorrow. He asks if it’s better than cooking at Spinney’s, asks what her workday will be like. She laughs and falls silent, then suddenly looks sad. “Why do you ask?” she wants to say, but she keeps quiet. She feels an emptiness in her chest. Saman Yarid feels hollow as well.

She makes some tea while they smoke in the kitchen. He asks if she wants to eat out somewhere. She says she did earlier, but now she feels a bit tired and would rather stay in. Let’s order something if you’re hungry, she says, let’s order something from Kaakat or Pizza Hut, or if you like it, I can make something quickly, there’s iceberg lettuce and feta cheese and tomatoes in the fridge, I can make you a Greek salad, and I’ve got basil too, or I can make you some spaghetti, are you hungry?

Her words add to his fatigue. This isn’t like her. What’s happening? But then again, he isn’t himself today either. They wore themselves out in the bedroom. Why’d they wear themselves out? He looks at her hair, long and black and straight, and he looks at her marble back. Why did she put on the dress again if she doesn’t want to go out?

You like Japanese, he replies, so why don’t we order from Maji, or from Sushi Bar?

She says she’ll eat some cake to celebrate her new job with him, but that he can order whatever he likes, that he should pick something and she’ll order it for him, he always pays, but tonight she’d like him to be her guest, that’s what she wants.

He says he feels the same, he’s not hungry enough for a full meal, he’d rather just have dessert, he’ll eat some cake with her and have some tea. Now come over here, he adds.

She draws closer and places her hand on his head, but doesn’t sit on his lap. She’s standing beside him now — he rests his ear against her stomach, and he can hear the blood coursing through her body. She asks him to order something, please, don’t say you’re not hungry, or let me make some food for you, and then we’ll eat cake.

I’m really not hungry, he says, and if I wanted to I’d order something. I want us to eat cake together and celebrate.

She pours some tea into two cups. A spoonful of sugar for her. Two spoonfuls for him. Cecilia knows him well. We’ll celebrate twice, she says. Once because I’m finished at Spinney’s. Now that I’ve left I can say what an awful place it was; or maybe it wasn’t awful, but it certainly wasn’t a good fit for me; I can say so now that it’s over. There was a hideous man there, he was so thick-skinned, as if he were made of rubber, and he’d say the most horrible things. One time on TV we saw a woman burning, a car had exploded as she was getting in, and she had caught on fire. A young man rushed over to her and wrapped her up in a sheet to put out the flames: he said that when he’d put the fire out, the woman was still conscious, and he said she’d thanked him. Her hand was burned, and later the doctors amputated it, and her leg as well; the woman didn’t lose consciousness, she could see her arm burned completely through, there was nothing left but bone — she could see the bones of her hand while they carried her off to intensive care. And that man who worked with us, the rubber man, was looking at the TV as if he were eating her up with his eyes, and then he looked at us, and he kept joking around and saying awful things and laughing.

There are a lot of insensitive people in the world, says Saman Yarid.

Cecilia says no, it’s not that, it’s not that he’s insensitive, that’s not what I’m saying; it’s hard for you to understand what I mean, let’s not talk about it.

We’re celebrating because you left Spinney’s. What else are we celebrating?

She smiles and says, we’re celebrating a lot things.

A car horn goes off outside, and another one answers it. A lot of roads come together in this neighborhood, and the traffic becomes quite congested here at night.

She brings over two plates, and some silverware. The car horns stop for a moment, then go off in a single blast again. They can hear a man shouting, and then a woman. Beirut is tense. Everyone is skittish. But the steam still rises from the teacups. And the cake smells sweet.

Cecilia says she hesitated before taking the job.

He asks her why.

She says the previous kitchen manager never stepped down.

What happened? Saman asks. Did they fire him?

She shakes her head to say “no” while lifting a piece of cake from the box to his plate. A piece covered in chocolate, adorned with nuts and a ring of delicate white cream.

What happened then? Saman asks her.

He wanted to add, “Did he die, for example?” But he didn’t.

Cecilia lifts another piece of cake from the box, looks into her boyfriend’s face, and then says the cook disappeared, he disappeared and no one knows what happened to him, his family doesn’t know where he’s gone, and neither do his colleagues at work; he disappeared without ever resigning from his job in the kitchen, and without anyone firing him. But that’s not the strangest thing about the whole business. The thing that confused the police and the authorities was that the cameras at Monoprix recorded the cook entering the supermarket at the beginning of the workday, but they never recorded him leaving it. The man disappeared inside the place.

~ ~ ~

The man Cecilia loved was killed during the war. His name is engraved on the martyrs’ monument in Sassine Square. Saman Yarid has heard parts of his story. The man was her cousin on her mother’s side, a few years older than Cecilia. She had grown attached to him when she was just a child. It was as if she’d emerged from the womb loving him. The massacres transformed him: all that blood had an effect on him. He stopped showing up at her house (the house of his aunt), or at the home of his own family. That period lasted a long time. Then he regained his laughter, and the darkness receded from his eyes. As if his body were full of light again. He stopped sleeping at the party headquarters and started staying at home again. He was not killed in a battle. He was not killed on the front line or in a raid. He was killed by an errant round of shells between the two halves of the city. Cecilia saw him naked after they had cleaned the corpse. Among the women drowning in black dresses his body had seemed so white. A body as white as cotton, smooth, without a single hair, like the body of a boy, or that of a woman: unblemished, whole, without a scar. But there was a piece of tape on the nipple of his right breast.

George Azar was buried in the Mar Mitr Cemetery. Cecilia’s mother fell ill shortly afterward. Her illness lasted one or two months, then she recovered. Saman Yarid does not know anyone in Cecilia’s family except for one aunt on her mother’s side who has three children and lives in the Sin al-Fil suburb of Beirut. He had met her here, at Cecilia’s place. Afterward, he told his girlfriend that she had some of her aunt’s features. Cecilia replied that her family thinks she got her looks from her father’s side, not her mother’s. When her mother died in 1989, Cecilia had a mental and physical breakdown. Her father helped her through that period. But it wasn’t long until her father left her in turn, during the fourth year of peace after the war. The father died in those complicated and incomprehensible days that followed the explosion in the Our Lady of Salvation Church, the bombing which led to the arrest of Samir Geagea, the head of the Lebanese Forces, and to his being put in the underground Defense Ministry prison in the Yarze district. Cecilia inherited this apartment from her father, along with a small share in the Winner’s restaurant on Sassine Square. The restaurant went bankrupt shortly thereafter, but the apartment remained.

It’s now the beginning of October 2005. Cecilia has started her new job at Monoprix, and Saman Yarid sees her almost every day. Sometimes she works quite late, until ten in the evening: she has to clean up the kitchen and prepare everything for the following day. She doesn’t cook at night; she does the cooking early in the morning. But she stays late to prepare what’s needed for the following morning: the mornings are always hectic and busy. She has some assistants: two young women and a young man. The man divides his time between two different departments: the kitchen and the meat locker.

Cecilia tells Saman that the women who work at Monoprix say the cook who disappeared was extremely polite. He was known as a quiet type, someone who always spoke kindly to others, who stayed above the employees’ squabbles and quarreling. And he was known for how good-natured he was whenever he ventured into the fish department: he was somehow related to the tall lean man in charge of the fish. And like that man, his two big hands caught people’s eyes. He had a family and some siblings, but he wasn’t married, and had passed the age of marriage.

Cecilia asks Saman if he remembers the pink house that used to be on Sassine Square — the one torn down a few years ago.

His memory fails him for a moment, but then returns. Saman says he does remember it. He’s surprised he could have forgotten that house — it was a house that caught the eye of any passerby. It was located in a space now occupied by a glass high-rise whose apartments have yet to be filled: between Chocolat Nora and Dunkin’ Donuts. How could you forget the pink house, Saman? How could you forget the rectangular garden with its red dirt and dried-up pine trees? How could you forget the concrete wall and the brown rust-covered railing? How could you forget the locked iron gate? When you were a boy, you used to leave the Sons of Neptune Club with your friend Salim Samaha, and the two of you would stop in front of the Abu Felix Shop and drink a soda and look at the house’s closed shutters covered in bird droppings; and the two of you would keep telling the same story over and over again; no, it wasn’t a story, it was nothing but some obscure piece of news one of you had once heard, yet it had become a part of your shared memory. “That house is haunted.” That’s why no one was willing to rent it. A family used to own it, but the family had died. They were kidnapped or killed by the shelling, or maybe they died of natural causes in their sleep, but people said the owner of the house had gone mad and killed his family members before killing himself. Saman didn’t know the story, and neither did his friend, but they both knew no one was willing to rent that locked-up house drowning in silence. The square was always brimming with lights and movement, and all the buildings were full of people, but that house remained silent and dark and alone in the shade of its black pine trees. When the autumn wind was blowing, the red dust would kick up onto the sidewalk outside the openwork iron gate. And when the winter wind stormed in, it blasted through the treetops and covered the outside stairs with a layer of dry wine-colored pine needles. They didn’t know all the details. But they did know that a man from the Deeb family had come with his wife and children and rented the house during the war. He’d been displaced, and could find nowhere else to stay. The neighborhood’s empty houses were all filled with displaced families and people who had left their homes on the other side of the city: the only place left was this locked-up house full of echoes, a house wrapped up in stories, its roof covered in cobwebs. But that man had lived in it for just three weeks. He didn’t even finish out the month of rent he had paid. He took his family and left.

The reader can visit the Shafiq Deeb and Sons shoe store near the Our Lady Church in Achrafieh to learn more about that house’s story. The reader can also ask the man who always sits in the midday heat selling lottery tickets and fortune cards by the wall of the Telephone and Postal Service building on Sassine Square. He sits there and eats with the shoeshine man. The two of them drink water they get from the building’s doorman, and from the LibanPost security guard. They eat and watch the businessmen entering the French-Lebanese Bank across the way.

Cecilia tells Saman that one of the girls who works at the Monoprix cash registers heard from a woman (a woman who was slowly emptying her cart as she worked out her bill on a tiny calculator she’d pulled out of a black handbag with a silver clasp) that the curse of the pink house — the house that had been torn down about five years ago, more or less (even we, the people of the neighborhood, have lost track of time and can no longer remember) — the woman said the curse of the pink house had fallen on the new high-rise building as well: that tower rises straight over Sassine Square and the ABC Mall, yet its apartments are still half empty! All the high-rises in this area sell out quickly, but this one is still little more than a blueprint. Saman knows this. The new building in the Nasra district, at the intersection near the Oil and Thyme restaurant, sold all twenty of its stories while they were still digging the foundation. The papers talk 24/7 about an economic crisis and the country’s abject poverty, and all the while people are buying up units before new buildings are even built! On the TV they said two percent of the population owns eighty percent of the country’s wealth.

That woman — who was slowly taking all the canned foods out of her cart, lining them up in front of the cashier, and meticulously keeping track of the bill on her tiny calculator — said a similar curse had once fallen on this place as well, a long time ago. Before it became the Monoprix, it was called the Abeela Supermarket. The Abeelas were an old family from Beirut. Saman Yarid had heard about them from his grandmother. Jacob Abeela, who had French roots and was the grandfather of the family, had come to Beirut from Acre. He was said to have been a doctor in Bonaparte’s army, and to have escaped its plague-stricken ranks and fled to Sidon. He was sick when he arrived in Sidon. A poor woman from the Zaydan family saved him, so he married her, and then brought her to Beirut. (Saman Yarid’s grandmother used to tell stories while she was embroidering the sheets or sewing covers by hand.) The Abeelas were an old family, and when this complex was built — these buildings on what they now call the “Beirut Hills” — there were some problems with one of the buildings: the foundation was cracked, or maybe the building was leaning a bit. A dispute broke out among the associates, and one of them sold his share to the rest.

All of this land was originally — about 150 years ago — the property of a single person. But the man divided it up into separate properties so his children would not run into any problems about using it after his death. And his heirs had no problems. Half of them wanted to leave the country in the first place. So half the land came to be in the hands of the Abeela family, and half was owned by the Shartoni family. The “Mexico Villa” was raised on the latter’s half. The elder Saman Yarid — the younger Saman’s grandfather and namesake — was the one who built it. In its entrance, between two columns bearing sculptures of lions, a date was carved into the stone: 1933.

The discerning eye will notice that this old-fashioned three-story villa (half-concealed behind the tall oaks and the high wall) bears a resemblance to the buildings on Maarad Street. The hands of a single man had molded all these structures. The younger Saman Yarid feels as if he’s speaking with his grandfather whenever he passes by these buildings. In the winter, when rain washes the oak trees, the walls of the Mexico Villa gleam, as if yellow light were flowing out of its old stones. As they devour their hot manakish sandwiches and drink sweetened tea from plastic cups, the people standing in the warm bakery entrance beside the Bristol Patisserie can’t keep their eyes off the wet oak trees and the dazzling villa.

Saman Yarid tells Cecilia that that land stretching from the police station to the Berty Pharmacy is full of wells and vast underground hollow reservoirs and caves filled with water. You can see them in the buildings’ foundation maps. And you can discover them for yourself if you’re on that street in winter: a biting cold fills certain spaces there. Walking from the pharmacy to the police station is like crossing a mountain pass. The winds are not the only reason — the waters beneath the paved street are also to blame: This is the belly of Mount Achrafieh. And that mountain’s belly is full of water. Each building there is served by just a single well. And, even if they keep drawing water from them for a hundred years, those wells won’t dry up. In other places, the wells dry up quickly, but not here. And those underground reservoirs have voices. That’s why so many people in the old houses in those neighborhoods speak of ghosts: voices beneath the tiles, voices that seem to come from beyond the walls. At night you can hear whispers. But those aren’t ghosts. They’re the underground waters and passing currents of air. The houses on Ghandour al-Saad are old as well — there are no steel towers on that street — and you can hear those same whispers in them. It sounds like wailing, or like people talking behind closed doors. One sometimes imagines it’s the old pictures on the walls, the framed black and white photographs in the parlor. But it’s not the pictures. It’s the air and water beneath the tiles. Whispers from beneath the earth.

Cecilia says the cashier told her Abeela closed the supermarket because of all the ghost stories, and because one of the parking lot workers disappeared. Abeela shut the place down without a word of warning. He didn’t even pay the employees any compensation.

Saman says he remembers the employees standing with their signs and protesting in front of the iron gate of the locked-up building — how many years ago now? It wasn’t that long ago. They were holding up their signs and demanding compensation. Others were sitting on the sidewalk and eating sandwiches: mortadella sandwiches, and sandwiches with fresh yogurt, and sandwiches filled with yellow cheese. He was heading up to the Starbucks on Sassine Square, or to the Chase restaurant, or to Duwayhi Sweets, or maybe even to the Wakeem restaurant, and could see the women who used to work at the supermarket sitting and smoking their cigarettes beneath the open parasols that protected them from the rain. And when the sky cleared up, he saw them looking at the buildings across the way: high-rises with Bangladeshi and Sri Lankan women cleaning the balcony windows. They were standing outside the windows, high above the street, on those small concrete basins that are attached to the buildings where people put their plants. They were standing out there in their pink clothes and cleaning the windows, and also the basins beneath their feet. One of them was desperately clinging to the broad window in front of her as she wiped the glass, terrified of falling backward. And the newly unemployed women were silently watching her from down below.

Cecilia says Monoprix bought the place for next to nothing: it has a lot of space, and the parking lot is huge, and the location excellent. All of Achrafieh does its shopping there now. The Monoprix has ruined the other stores, big and small. All of them do less business now, all of their profits have dwindled, and some of them have closed. The Saint Elie supermarket is practically empty now. The Aoun still has customers, but not like before. Do you remember, Cecilia asks, when the Embassy Supermarket used to be there, where the Aoun is now?

Saman Yarid asks her in turn: Do you remember when there was a cinema on that same spot, before it was a supermarket? Do you remember the Embassy Cinema?

I remember, Cecilia replies. It had red seats.

I used to love the food at the Abeela, says Saman. That supermarket had a different layout. The food was on the upper level — the street level. Why did Monoprix move the food section underground? We used to sit and eat at tables between the big refrigerators at the entrance to the Abeela. They didn’t use that level for clothes back then.

Cecilia says a lot of people drive there, and the parking lot’s underground: the people here don’t like going anywhere without their cars.

Saman asks her if she remembers what it looked like outside the windows of her place ten years ago, before the Sons of Neptune Club was torn down and all these high-rises went up?

She says the house used to be flooded with light at sunset. The walls turned red, and so did the TV. But the steel rooftops of the ABC complex buildings have blocked the view. She lets out a short laugh and asks: Why don’t you join the club? They’ve opened it again.

They opened it a few weeks ago in a different building, he says, but it’s not the same. They put up a sign with the old name on it and the date of its founding, but it’s not the same club we used to go to. Where’s the basketball court? Where are the bleachers? Where are the high ceilings?

Cecilia says she loves looking at the mall in the evening. Through the four iron bars of her bathroom window, she can see all the couples on the escalators: men and women, young and old, going up or going down. She loves that view, especially in winter — there’s less noise in winter.

~ ~ ~

Sunday, October 9th. It’s hard to sleep without air conditioning. Before he went to sleep, his head was starting to ache. “My head was hurting because I hadn’t slept the night before.” But now he wakes up with an awful headache. What time is it? Two o’clock in the morning. It’s technically Monday now. Two-fifteen. “My head was killing me. It felt like there was a tumor inside it, threatening to shatter my skull.” He remembers a movie he saw at the Empire Cinema about people who eat monkey brains. (He looks at the woman lying next to him on the narrow bed, sunk in sleep.) They broke the monkeys’ skulls open (from the top) while they were still alive, and ate the brains with a spoon. The thought helps his headache. “I opened the window, and as I sat in bed I saw the lights on Beirut’s hills overlooking the Bay of Dawra, and the black ghost of the mountain of trash in the Burj Hammoud district. A solitary star was shining in the sky.” This night. This extreme heat. As he was falling asleep earlier, he’d heard a strange noise beyond the wall, as if it were raining on the tiles. But it wasn’t raining. On the morning of Wednesday, September 28th, it had rained for fifteen minutes in West Beirut. Liliane told him about it. She was on her way to the Hamra district. She went into a store, and when she came out she saw people opening their umbrellas, and felt a few drops on her face. It didn’t rain in East Beirut, but it did rain in Hamra. He’d thought it might have been raining earlier that night, before his headache woke him up.

What’s he doing here? He leaves the bed and walks into the kitchen. The apartment is cramped. He doesn’t know how Liliane can live with her friend. The place isn’t big enough for one person, let alone two. What’s he doing here? This headache — the alcohol thick in his head, as if it were stuffed with coarsely ground iron.

He closes the kitchen door and turns on the light. He moves very slowly — he doesn’t want to wake her up. He makes a pot of coffee and sits down at the table. With the first sip of the strong coffee, he can feel a hole start expanding inside his head. “That’s good,” thinks Saman Yarid.

There are newspapers on the table. Newspapers and magazines, and a bag of raisins and dried apricots. Last Sunday’s paper. What was he doing on Saturday October 1st (eight days ago now)? The first day of the month: the police were defusing a bomb beneath Judge Khoury’s car — the judge in charge of the case surrounding the Al-Madina bank. “Sources have said the case is tied to the work of the international investigation commission, and that the commission was attempting to establish a link between Al-Madina’s bankruptcy and certain sums used to finance the deadly attack on the motorcade. ” A neighbor returning to her home on the Sahel Alma Highway (between the Adma suburb of Beirut and the Keserwan district northeast of the city) at a late hour had seen two people behind the car in a parking lot. The two then fled on a motorcycle. The motorcycle shattered the silence of the night. A Member of Parliament later held a televised press conference: he said the judge’s family had, from the third floor, seen a man jump over the wall of the parking lot, perhaps because the building’s entrance was fitted with surveillance cameras.

Yesterday (Saturday, October 8th) an earthquake struck Pakistan. Earlier, on the TV, they said there were thousands of dead and wounded. Now Saman looks at the pictures in the paper. “The Pakistani Interior Minister said entire cities and villages in Kashmir have been wiped out.” A second sip of coffee. Hot. Bitter. “This is good.” The hole is expanding, the hole in the wall of his head, releasing the ground iron and the pressure. There must be some aspirin in these drawers. Aspirin or Panadol. This headache. This heat. Saman Yarid thinks about his uncle who died of a brain tumor (he wasn’t really his uncle, but when Saman was small he used to call him “my uncle”): the deceased Baseel Yarid. He left his house to a charitable organization that belonged to the diocese — the Beirut diocese of the Melkite Catholic Church. Every time Saman passes by that church, in front of the upper Jesuit entrance, his uncle crosses his mind. Sometimes he passes by the white building where the Cozmo restaurant is located, and then by his uncle’s house. He often stops there to look at the trees and plants surrounding the house, and he always notices the cracked tiles. There’s another old building behind his uncle’s, on Youssef Sader Street: the Samaha family lived there. The “Greek House” was located at the end of the street (which was a dead end): it belonged to a Greek woman who was often talked about when Saman was a child. She rented out some rooms, and once a shipmaster came — a shipmaster from Cyprus with white hair and a red face — and rented the room on the third floor. Saman remembers being at the end of the street when he was just a boy and looking at the Greek woman’s customers sitting and laughing and eating in the garden in front of that house, its doors wide open. He remembers a table with a deep oblong bowl. That clear glass bowl was full of green salad with onions and tomatoes. There were large glasses of arrack beside it. They looked like glasses of milk. Smoke and smells were rising from the brazier beneath the palm tree. The shipmaster was taking pieces of chicken from a dish and placing them on the wire grill above the brazier. The Greek woman was laughing, sending ripples through the fat in her arms. The smell of grilled meat, and yogurt, and garlic.

Saman moves cautiously. He pours himself another cup — the sound of the coffee streaming from the pot into it. The quiet night. And beyond the wall, outside, the city murmuring in its sleep. A few minutes ago while he was sitting in bed, he had looked out the window and seen the yellow line of lights from one of the streets of Burj Hammoud. The houses were packed close together, and the lights were climbing up the foothills. The city was utterly still. What is he doing here?

If he went back into the bedroom, would he be able to find his clothes and put them on and leave without. Could he manage to slip out without making any noise? Could he slip out like a ghost, without Liliane noticing or waking up or asking him what was going on, or why he was getting dressed, or where he was going in the night?

He washes his face in the bathroom. A line of ants is crawling on the washing machine. From the narrow window he can see a spotlight, beyond all the run-down tin-roof houses. The penetrating light is a mixture of white and yellow, and is suspended from massive steel arms. The night shift at a construction site. The clamor does not reach him here. All these houses and shacks! All these tin and concrete roofs! How many families live in this tangled mesh of neighborhoods? How do they sleep in this heat? And who’s building a high-rise here?

His father told him this whole place used to be terraced fields of olive and mulberry trees. And orange trees had been planted at the lower end of the plain. This entire area used to be full of green gardens. Gazelles could be seen here in the days of his grandfather. And over there, where the Beirut River flows into the sea and where the brown landfill, spotted with green grass in the springtime, now rises up — there at the river’s mouth you could see slender white fish with pink flesh. The French used to farm those fish. But on this plain, between the gardens, they built an airport and cargo holds. His grandmother told him she used to come here on Sundays with her family, after Mass. They used to come to Daoud Pasha Park to hear the French military band play, and to watch the planes take off from the airport there, circle above the mountain, and then land again.

The concrete houses and tin roofs multiply before his eyes. They advance from all four directions and bear down on this narrow window, bear down on his eyes, bear down on his chest. It’s as if the walls are falling in on the cramped apartment. This awful headache. He thought the coffee had cured him. The pain had receded for a moment, but returns with renewed force. He has to escape. To slip out. To leave. He’s got to leave now. But he can’t move. It’s impossible. He’s chained to the walls. And to his pounding head. Paralyzed, captive.

“A nightmare,” thinks Saman Yarid, and he sees himself getting dressed and walking out into the street: the way is long; a row of columns and orange lights; and himself, walking.

~ ~ ~

He won’t go in to the office today. He wants to relax. He’ll take a day off, a day away from work. He won’t look at any maps, take any calls, or drink the office coffee. He takes a long shower: that sweet water. It flows over his head, his shoulders, his back. Then he slowly dries himself off. A cold beer is waiting for him in the fridge, but he decides not to drink it. He takes it out then puts it back in the fridge again. He makes a cup of warm milk instead. He drinks some of the milk and lays down on his bed. He wants to sleep, if only for an hour. Maybe he’ll forget last night. It was as if he’d arrived back at his place from a trip to hell. He recalls the line of ants crawling on the washer: one of the ants seemed to grow larger in front of him — it swelled up and rushed forward to encounter another rushing ant. The insects moved darkly. They both stopped as they came together. The head of the one ant touched the head of the other. And then the first one quickly continued on its way. Why did they freeze up for a moment like that, their two heads touching? And why did they both continue on their way again so quickly? And the most important question of all, Saman: Why are you thinking about ants?

He laughs as he sits up again to drink some more milk, beneath the high ceiling. There’s no need to turn on the air conditioning. It’s cool here. The weather is pleasant, and there’s no need to listen to the AC. He drinks his milk and dozes off a bit. He wants to sleep, to forget what happened yesterday. He made a mistake. He shouldn’t have stayed out so late with Liliane. He should have sat here and watched TV, or gone and had dinner with Roger at Al Dente. But he wasn’t in the mood to spend time with Roger. Had he been in the mood for Liliane? It was stupidity, nothing more. A psychological shortcoming. “Some unknown internal deficiency,” thinks Saman Yarid. She had called to ask what he was doing. He said he was sitting down. Should I come over? she asked. He hesitated a moment and then said no, I’ll come over and we’ll go to Kaslik, it’s been a long time since I’ve been in that area, let’s go there.

She said all of Kaslik was empty these days, people were afraid of explosions, and everyone was going out on this side of town, so why don’t we go to Al-Balad instead, it’s closer, and that the food’s better than anything in Kaslik.

He said he was tired of Al-Balad, and wanted to drive for a while.

They went out in Kaslik. With each glass, he told himself he would not drink another. But he knew himself. The first glass was just the start. He drank a lot. Even though he was thinking the whole time: I don’t want to drink, I’ll go out with Liliane for an hour, or maybe two, and then I’ll go home, Cecilia’s at work now, but she’ll be done in an hour. The night shift ends at 11:30, she had said, but she’s staying past closing. There are a few things she wants to make sure of, there are aisles full of stuff, and she’s got orders as well, there are always a lot of big orders for Monday morning, and on the weekend, but the orders these days are bigger than ever before, it’s Ramadan, and the work never ends at Monoprix during Ramadan, empty cars flock there from the four corners of Beirut and leave filled to the brim with food, more evidence that the Civil War has ended, fifteen years of peace seem inconclusive, but the sight of Monoprix’s kitchen and all the orders coming in during Ramadan, that’s decisive proof.

Saman said he didn’t know the people of West Beirut shopped at Monoprix.

You wouldn’t believe the number of pots on the boil in our kitchen, Cecilia replied. She said she had asked the management to hire three more assistants — she won’t be able to keep up with the orders if they don’t.

He went out with Liliane to a nightclub next to the Espace Cinema. Where were the Sunday crowds he knew so well? The whole area used to be packed, the traffic always at a standstill. Where were the Russian and Bulgarian women who used to line up by the road? Where were the foreigners, the locals, the people from the Gulf? The place wasn’t exactly desolate, but it seemed so. Saman Yarid thought it must be his state of mind. It’s been so up and down lately. It wasn’t like him. He was discovering dark regions inside himself he’d never known before. Cecilia was the cause; he knew that. He knew and he didn’t. Did he know it? When he’s with her, a strange feeling comes over him: he feels as if he has never known anything in his life. He thought he used to know things, but now he doesn’t know them. He always watches her when she tells him about her work, about the layout of the place, about the girls working there, about a manager named Albert Naqqash, about the security people, about the cameras and surveillance devices, about the fresh local produce that arrives at dawn from the vegetable market beside the Sports City stadium, about the imported vegetables brought in from the port in the evening. She talks and talks and talks and he never gets tired of listening. She’s been laughing more these days, but sometimes she grows sad and falls silent. She suddenly becomes absentminded in the middle of a sentence, and her gaze wanders off to some distant unseen place, to a place of shadows, falling on some remote spot and losing itself there. In those moments, it feels as if she’s slipped out of his grasp — kidnapped, snatched away in the blink of an eye and taken to some place he doesn’t know, a place he can’t bring her back from.

When had he started becoming so attached to her? In bed, she tells him she’s been having nightmares, a lot of nightmares. She sees herself on the road as the shelling starts: the bombs are falling all around her and she wants to run away, but can’t. Wherever she turns, she sees the falling bombs: white ones that look like crystal spheres, like the metal balls people hang from Christmas trees, but she knows they’re bombs, she knows they can wreck houses and trucks, and she knows a single piece of shrapnel can kill you.

He tells her the state of the country is behind her nightmares: the tension and anticipation as everyone waits for the Mehlis Report.

But she says she’s been having these nightmares her whole life. She can’t remember a single week of her life when she hasn’t had some. In one, she saw herself without a home. She tried to find it, but the building was gone. She looked for it on Sassine Square, then at the Alexandre Hotel, and then on Sodeco Square. She combed Achrafieh looking for her home, but couldn’t find it. Then it occurred to her that it might have crossed the demarcation line, crossed Bechara al-Khoury Road and gone to West Beirut. She says she crossed that line in the nightmare. The war was still raging in her dream, and she could see Bechara al-Khoury all dug up and covered with barrels and barricades. She saw a burning car, and soldiers, and men in civilian clothes: some of them were eating a red watermelon, and others were taking aim and shooting at the stray cats and dogs. She saw them, and she saw the building. She saw her house. She saw the green shutters. She saw the house over there, its balconies overlooking the bridge in the Basta district, in West Beirut. How the house had moved all the way over there, she didn’t know. It didn’t seem strange in the nightmare. It was as if it were normal for houses to move from one place to another, as if the building were a car or an animal. She wanted to go home — and that was her home, she knew it, she had lived there her whole life, and all her things were inside — but she was scared of the men and the soldiers. There was a fair-skinned boy among them: extremely fair, as if he had leprosy. He was holding a black rabbit. The boy walked up to her and told her to follow him: Don’t be afraid, I’ll take you home.

Saman looks at the smoke rising from the cigarette on the edge of the ashtray. He feels some tightness in his heart, and in his stomach, as if he were caught in a vise. He wants to help Cecilia. But how can he help her? When she tells him about the nightmare, he doesn’t have the feeling she’s fully woken up from it. He feels as if she is still there, still in the heart of it. She is still on the demarcation line looking at her house, which has escaped to the other side; she is still looking at the leper approaching and telling her to follow him: Don’t be afraid, I’ll take you home.

Saman doesn’t trust him.

Cecilia says the boy put the black rabbit under his arm and started clapping — she didn’t know why he did that. Then she falls silent.

Saman asks her what happened next.

Cecilia says she woke up from the dream while the boy was still clapping. That was the end of the nightmare. There was nothing else.

Saman says nightmares are like that, it’s hard for us to understand them. Once in a dream he saw himself running along the road in front of his grandfather’s house on his mother’s side — a summer house on the mountain. He was running and dogs were chasing him. It was dark but he could hear the dogs barking, and when he arrived at a lit-up place and turned around for a moment he saw the pack of dogs emerge from the darkness. They looked like wolves. He saw their faces — not their teeth, but their quick faces, gray and white. Their barks were terrifying.

Cecilia says a woman who works with her in Monoprix told her the cook who disappeared had been sick.

“Sick how?” Saman asks. “Physically sick?”

Cecilia had asked the woman the same thing, but the woman shook her head without saying a word.

When Liliane speaks, he doesn’t listen. She’d said strange things about a ship carrying cattle. He didn’t understand. His mind was somewhere else. Why had he left the house last night? He shouldn’t have left. But he was afraid she would insist on seeing him, afraid she would come to his house, which he didn’t want, so he had gone out. “I said I’d go out for a bit and then come back,” thought Saman Yarid.

But he didn’t manage to come back. The alcohol wore him out, weakened his resolve. Was it the alcohol that weakened him? No. It wasn’t the alcohol. If it were the alcohol, how come he had no trouble driving from Kaslik to her place? He wanted to drop her off and leave, but she wouldn’t let go of him. Liliane clung to him like an octopus, rubbing his face, until he finally got up in the darkness, unable to breathe, his head pounding. She clung to him as he climbed up the dark stairs to her apartment: the light was out. What had brought him there? It was like spending a night in hell.

But the memory of that night is fading now. He knows it was the last time. He can feel it in his gut. A bodily sensation. As if he had just swallowed the pit of a plum.

His relationship with Liliane is over. The pit is stuck in his throat. That was the last time. He won’t do it again. This had nothing to do with psychological weakness. It had nothing to do with the stairs. Nothing to do. He dozes off in that familiar place, on that familiar sofa, beneath those familiar windows. He dozes off in a house he inherited from his father, who had inherited it from his grandfather. He doesn’t want to think right now. He wants to sleep.

But his cell phone rings. It’s one of the Monoprix numbers. He has come to expect those numbers lately.

Where are you? Cecilia asks.

He says he’s at home.

She says she tried to call him yesterday, but his cellphone was off. And she tried the home phone as well, but he didn’t pick up.

I was with some friends outside the city, he says. They came by and picked me up and I didn’t get back till late.

He feels ill at ease saying this. He’s usually nonchalant during these kinds of phone calls, but not this morning.

She says she wants to tell him something.

What? he asks.

Not on the phone, she says.

Come over to my place then, he says. Can you leave?

She says she’s busy now, but this evening, after she finishes: she won’t be staying very late tonight, she’ll be done before nine, we’ll meet tonight.

And she adds: I’ll be home after nine; you come over here.

He feels uneasy as she speaks. He knows she can tell he’s done something wrong. He knows from the tone of her voice. He knows because she doesn’t want to come to his place. He knows because he knows. Strange things are happening deep within him these days. As if unknown corridors were opening up inside his body. These impenetrable feelings. All this uneasiness. These ups and downs.

She says she’s busy right now, but she wanted to hear his voice. And then she says she’s discovered something strange.

She says she’s discovered something strange in the kitchen storeroom, not the one connected to the kitchen — there’s another storeroom connected to the parking lot, its door is by the elevator, the elevator the customers use. It’s a small storeroom with old cooking equipment and some other stuff, she had never gone in before, but she needed some pots and baking dishes, so her assistant took her there — he came with her and she found the pots. She handed him some pots, picked up some others, and was about to follow him, but then she saw something else she wanted, a tray by the old refrigerator, in a corner of the storeroom filled with cleaning supplies. She put down the pots to pick up the tray, and as she bent over to pick it up off the ground she felt a cold draft on her neck. A terribly cold draft, as if from a freezer. But the refrigerator wasn’t plugged in! Its door was open and there were bags of “Yes” brand cleaning powder on its shelves. They used the fridge for storage, not for refrigeration, so where was the draft coming from? Cecilia said she managed to budge the fridge a little — she was able to push it — and when she had moved it a bit she saw an opening behind the fridge, something that looked like a doorway, but without a door. She was looking at the entrance of a tunnel. She moved the fridge far enough for her to enter, and went in. She walked along it until the light coming from behind her grew dim. She stood there in the darkness, and knew the tunnel kept on going.

As he silently listens to her words, Saman can feel his heartbeat racing. His stomach seizes up as he waits for the end of the story. But Cecilia stops talking.

What did you do? he asks.

She says she didn’t do anything. She went back to the storeroom and shoved the fridge back into place. She didn’t know what to do. But when she was standing there in the darkness, she had thought of him.

He asks her when this happened.

Yesterday, she replies, before we closed.

Had she asked the people she works with about the tunnel?

She says she hasn’t asked anyone.

Why not?

I don’t know, she says. I just haven’t.

He can feel her holding back. He can tell she was about to say, “I wanted to speak to you first,” but she doesn’t say it. Why not? Was it because he said he was with friends outside Beirut last night?

He says the tunnel could itself be another storeroom, an unused one. Or it could lead to another storeroom. Why doesn’t she ask someone at Monoprix? The management will surely know.

But he feels tired as he utters these words, as if he were running in a place without air, as if he were falling into the sea.

How could it be a storeroom? she asks. It’s so long and narrow.

He asks her what she wants him to do, he can get dressed and come over right now, he can be there in a half hour, less, in a quarter hour, and they can talk. He says he can hardly hear her voice over the phone, it’s better to talk in person, he can be there in ten minutes.

She says she doesn’t want to raise her voice because the place is starting to get crowded. And she says no, don’t come now, we’ll talk in the evening.

Why don’t we meet in the afternoon, he asks, I can come by and we can eat lunch together and talk, I’ll come by Monoprix at one thirty, ok?

No, she says, I’ve got a lot going on today, especially in the afternoon. We’ll meet at my place, at nine o’clock, after I’m done with work.

~ ~ ~

Saman Yarid lies down on his bed. “Can I fall asleep?” Milk doesn’t work, neither does Lexotanil (Bromazepam), or turning on the AC. He tosses and turns in the wide bed. He can’t sleep. So he gets up from the crumpled sheets.

He lights the gas stove and makes another pot of coffee. His head is full of nails. And he can feel some pressure in his chest. When the smell of coffee fills the air, he decides he doesn’t want any. He pours the coffee into the sink, takes some cold water out of the fridge, and goes over to the TV.

Light pours in from the high circular skylights and undulates on the ceiling. Air enters through the windows, bringing in the noise of the nearby streets (the roads are packed now with cars heading down to the Jesuit University, a car for every person: the traffic is horrible). The air also brings in an unfamiliar smell. This isn’t the smell of the oak tree and the garden outside the window. What is this awful smell? The sewers? On the other side of Mount Achrafieh, where he spent last night, a horrid stench always assails the houses at the end of summer: the trash at the Burj Hammoud Landfill starts rotting, the cumulative effect of all the summer heat. And the slaughterhouse sends out gases too: the remains of decomposing carcasses. But those smells only reach this side of the mountain when there’s a strong wind. He can’t hear the wind in the oak tree, so why is the smell so powerful right now? Have they opened up the sewers in one of the nearby streets?

Saman Yarid closes the windows and turns on the air conditioning. Lying on the big cozy sofa in front of the TV, he tries closing his eyes — maybe he can fall asleep. This familiar sofa. The smell of its fabric. The ancient engraved wood of the headrest: he knows these engravings by heart. He sinks farther into the sofa and tries to sleep. The noise of Monday morning comes in from outside. It won’t let him sleep. The sound of the AC fails to overcome it. Horns and roaring engines: a city rushing by. At least that smell is fading. It slowly stops reaching his nose. Where are they all rushing off to outside? And why are they honking their horns? Sirens wouldn’t be able to clear a path through that sea of steel and tin and glass.

Images of wrecked villages appear on TV. Where is that? Kashmir? He turns up the volume as other images take their place: a city’s collapsing buildings. He watches as a building buckles, like an old man whose knees have snapped. In 1993 he started going down to Martyrs’ Square to look at the controlled explosions. Was it ’93 or ’92? As the years go by time blends together. He remembers the buildings rigged with dynamite, how they convulsed inside an awful cloud of dust and noise, and then collapsed. He had looked on without understanding: how could those buildings topple so easily when they were filled with steel? How could they just cave in like that? On the TV, a police officer is speaking in front of several microphones. A high-ranking officer — that’s clear from all the medals and stars. Saman is and is not listening. His head is ringing. His chest is tight. He should call the hospital and make his appointment. This pressure beneath his ribs is making it difficult to breathe. A street covered in debris, and a man carrying his child and walking among the overturned cars and the wrecked doors of shops. Goods are strewn on the road, and children are jumping over them. How were they saved from death? The news ticker at the bottom of the screen announces that an entire generation is buried beneath the rubble of Pakistan’s schools. International aid hasn’t arrived yet. Ambulances. Rescue workers wearing helmets and masks, climbing up the steel of a collapsed building. No, not one building, an entire complex of buildings turned into a mountain of concrete and steel. There are survivors beneath the rubble, survivors in the belly of that mountain of destruction. They can hear their voices beneath the debris. Workers carrying drills, climbing up the wrecked concrete. He wasn’t in Beirut when they blew up the Rivoli Cinema. He was away on a trip. When he returned, he went down to Martyrs’ Square and for the first time saw the vast blue sea as he stood by the central monument — the broad building had been blocking the water. The building fell, and the rubble was removed. Where was the rubble taken? To the Normandy Landfill? A cape of land stretching into the sea. He had seen some of the initial designs. There, off the cape that crossed into the landfill, glass towers would rise up. They wouldn’t be able to do that with the Burj Hammoud Landfill. The Normandy Landfill was right by the commercial district, the new center of the city. What was Burj Hammoud linked to? To the Armenian district. To a packed maze of houses and old neighborhoods of refugees who have been living like that since the First World War. One of his girlfriends once described her childhood home there to him: there was no water and no electricity. He didn’t believe her. How could that be? A house in Beirut without any water or electricity? That’s impossible, he told her. She described houses of clay and wood and tin. Her descriptions matched what he had seen on TV about the Palestinian camps. It was best for him not to think of such things. The world was full of misery. “But that’s not my world,” Saman Yarid thought to himself.

Not sleeping enough always saps his strength. He changes the channel. On National Geographic he sees elephants crossing green plains: the elephants are being threatened with extinction in Sri Lanka. There are only 2,500 left. The forests have given way to rice and tea fields. The English cut down the trees. And land mines from the Civil War are now dismembering the elephants. He sees a small elephant whose bones are visible. An emaciated creature, bones poking through its skin. It isn’t walking on all four legs: it’s missing one of its feet. It’s moving strangely. Its belly almost touches the ground as it moves forward, trying to keep up with the herd. Its pointed back makes it look like a pyramid. Why is he watching this?

He presses a button on the remote control. The news from the Rotana channel: Some artist is traveling to. He presses the button again. The weather in North America. What’s the temperature in Baltimore? He changes the channel as he starts to doze off. It’s a movie he’s seen before. Without realizing it, he falls asleep. The remote still in his hand on the edge of the sofa, Saman Yarid is fast asleep.

His cell phone wakes him. He opens his eyes and picks up the phone. It’s Roger’s number. It’s past one in the afternoon. How long has he been asleep? Four hours. He’s thirsty. Parched. He lets the phone ring and heads to the kitchen. He stands in front of the water cooler and drinks three full cups, spilling some on his shirt as he gulps it down. It’s as if he’s just crossed the Sahara. What’s this thirst? He keeps on drinking, but still feels empty. Then he notices he’s hungry as well. Horribly hungry.

He calls Oil & Thyme and orders three manakish sandwiches: one with thyme, one with cheese, and one with yogurt and bulgur. He could eat a whole sheep right now.

This is an exception to his diet. He doesn’t usually eat such heavy food. But he’s hungrier than he’s been in a long time. What’s this hunger? If it weren’t for mad cow disease, he’d have ordered minced meat as well.

It doesn’t take long for the food to arrive. He makes some tea while waiting for the food. And as the tea is steeping, he opens the fridge and looks at the bottles of milk (“Dairy Day” brand — skim), and at the cartons of yogurt and labneh cheese (“Tanayel Farms”), and at a circle of kashkawane cheese (“Hungary”). The bread’s in the freezer, as hard as ice. As he thinks about taking out the bread, the doorbell rings. The boy with the food says traffic slowed him down. It’s only a few yards from the Nasra district to Ghandour al-Saad Street, but traffic was backed up. So many cars, such a big mess. The food is six thousand liras. Saman gives him a ten-thousand-lira bill and tells him to keep the change. The boy thanks him happily, goes back out through the garden, closing the iron gate behind him, and then climbs onto a small motorcycle.

His cell phone rings again while he’s eating the thyme manakish and drinking some tea (by now his hunger is receding: he’s already devoured the hot cheese manakish). He looks at the number and sees a “22” area code. What’s this dark number that keeps calling him? His fingers are oily, but he rubs them off with a Kleenex and picks up the phone. The caller hangs up the very same instant. Calling the number back won’t work. He’s tried that before. This dark nonexistent number. When he dials it a voice in French tells him he has the wrong number, the number does not exist. But how can it call him if it doesn’t exist? And how does it appear on the screen? The landline rings as he sips his tea. He’s not going to get up. He doesn’t want to answer the phone. Who’s calling this time? They’d call his cell if it were something important. There’s a report about the Pyramids of Giza on the TV. He switches to a sports channel: a soccer match from the English Premier League, an old one in black and white. They’re wearing old uniforms. Long shorts that extend below the knees. And their haircuts are strange. A rolling ball, and men running after it. Quick movements. Were they quicker back then? The cell phone rings. It’s Roger’s number.

Roger says he tried calling him at the office, and that Rania (one of the two women who work there) said he had called in the morning to say he was taking a day off.

“Are you sick?”

Saman says he didn’t sleep enough last night.

Roger asks him where he is.

At home, he replies.

Why didn’t you pick up the phone then? he asks. He laughs and asks what he’s doing.

Saman says he’s eating.

“At home?”

He says everyone does that, not just him.

Roger asks what he’s eating.

“Manakish,” Saman replies. “And I’m drinking tea.”

“Manakish? At this hour?”

Saman says he just woke up.

“OK. How about grabbing dinner tonight?”

Saman says he has plans with Cecilia. But they’re not getting together until nine, and he could see Roger before that.

“I’ll call you later and we’ll figure it out,” Roger says, and hangs up.

There’s a program about the American intelligence agency on TV. His finger hurts from pressing the button on the remote so much — he’d been flipping through the channels while Roger was speaking. He tosses the remote on the sofa and polishes off the thyme sandwich. Porter Goss, the director of the CIA, has a 570-acre farm in the middle of Virginia. He raises cattle and sheep and poultry there with his wife Mariel. He also grows vegetables and fruits. It’s all organic — he doesn’t use any pesticides or chemical fertilizers. Now for the last of the manakish, the one with yogurt and bulgur. It’s a lovely pink color. He can smell onions mixed in with the yogurt. The residents of the area come to Goss’s farm to buy tomatoes and mulberries and pears. If they’re lucky Mrs. Goss sells them some of her organic jam, which she makes from mulberries she’s cooked on a wood stove. Goss is a graduate of Yale. He has wanted to retire since 1999. He bought that farm for one million three hundred thousand dollars. But in September 2004, George W. Bush, the American president, asked him to head the CIA. The War on Terror is in his hands now. He still goes back to the farm to relax on vacations. The place is peaceful. It’s not like Washington. Goss served in Congress for sixteen years. Now he’s waiting for the war to end so he can leave the CIA and spend more time on his farm. Green fields. A distant mountain range. And another mountain range beyond that one. Crates of tomatoes. Saman Yarid notices they resemble the tomatoes from the mountains of Lebanon. He too needs a break. He should take a vacation from this convulsive city, this sick city that doesn’t know it’s sick. Its nerves are frayed. He should call the Ehden Hotel up in the mountains and reserve a room, rest a bit from all this noise. The air is cool up there — in the north.

His cell phone rings. It’s Cecilia. It’s as if she’s read his mind. He was thinking of her when he thought about Ehden.

She asks him where he is.

He says he’s at home. He’s says he’s tired and taking the day off.

“Are you sick?”

“I’ve got to go get my annual physical.”

“Have you made an appointment?”

He says he’ll call right now.

She says she wanted to hear his voice.

He says that makes him happy, and he was just thinking about her.

“What were you thinking?”

He tells her about his plans to got to the hotel.

She says she can’t take any time off right now, but maybe in a week or two.

He asks her if she’s still uneasy about.

He falls silent, and doesn’t complete the sentence.

She doesn’t speak. Neither does he. There’s an ad for a French perfume on the television. Is the program about the CIA over? The silence lasts a few long seconds. What’s connecting the two of them right now? A telephone wire? His phone doesn’t have any wires. She’s calling him from a landline, and he’s receiving the call on a cell phone. His friend Gabe once told him a call from a normal telephone first goes to the country’s central exchange. And from the central exchange it travels to the cell phone company, where it is converted — on devices called “routers” — from a normal (analog) call to a (digital) cell phone call. Then the signal is transmitted. Saman and Gabe had been talking about Mehlis’s investigations into the cell phone companies. The German prosecutor discovered some suspicious calls that preceded the assassination on February 14th. On the TV, a woman is running along the beach, and dolphins are jumping out of the water.

Cecilia says she talked to Jihad, the man in charge of the fish department, and that he told her the storeroom became a shelter during the war, and was also used to store weapons during the “War of Elimination” between Michel Aoun and Samir Geagea in 1990. The tunnel in the room beside the elevator links up to another storeroom, which is empty and no longer in use. The police had searched the whole place when the cook (his name was Iskandar) disappeared.

Saman says that when she spoke to him in the morning, he felt as though she were telling him about a nightmare. And he says he hadn’t slept much because he’d taken some medication: he dreamt he was standing in a dark place, and didn’t know where he was. Cecilia laughs. And so does Saman.

He goes to the bathroom, then comes back to the TV. A documentary on Hong Kong. A market that sells dried fish. Shark fins, dry and yellow: people eat them fried. Why doesn’t he ask Cecilia to teach him how to cook? Cooking’s not hard. He watches her do it all the time. He’s never cooked anything in his life. Not even eggs. On the rare occasions he feels like eggs, he only ever boils them. He doesn’t know how to fry one. If he wants fried eggs, he goes to a restaurant. “I’m forty years old, and I still don’t know how to crack an egg into some butter or oil,” Saman Yarid thinks to himself.

His cell phone rings, then falls silent.

~ ~ ~

An hour of swimming will burn off the manakish. He gets changed, grabs a bag (filled with a towel, a swimsuit, a T-shirt, wallet, phone, and his keys), and leaves the house. He turns off Ghandour al-Saad and onto Rue Huvelin. It’s past three in the afternoon, and the students are coming and going from the restaurants and cafés by the Jesuit University. Rather than pass through the crowds in front of the university, or through the stream of cars leaving the underground parking lot, he turns right and heads onto Ayoub Tabet, a long, calm street. The shadows of the Jesuit stables stretch out on his left. How many times had his grandmother told him about the Jesuit priests in their long robes riding their horses along these dirt roads? The dirt has been covered by asphalt, and nothing remains of the old stone stables except this wall with its high and rusty iron-lattice windows. The place has turned into a parking lot. He steps onto the sidewalk, then steps down again. There’s a red Honda in front of the Citronnier Nursery: a crying child in a white dress jumps into her mother’s arms. He walks by the nursery school and passes under the dry branches of a carob tree (that tree is green in the springtime; and at the beginning of summer he can see its full pods hanging there like green beans).

There’s a nightclub past the carob tree, one he’s only been to a few times. And past the club there’s a small old sawmill out of which the smell of wood is drifting. The sawmill is in a vaulted cellar guarded by a wooden gate from bygone days. Inside, two elderly brothers are working. One of them is wearing an undershirt. Saman turns at the trash bins (men are sprinkling some white calcium powder around them, but the powder turns black and sticks to the asphalt like pitch) and walks on the sidewalk on the other side of the street. Saint Joseph (Jesuit) University Street stretches out before him, but he covers the ground quickly. It never takes long when he decides to walk fast. He used to run long distances in the old days, and play soccer too. But he stopped after his illness in the eighties. He lost contact with the team. Three different doctors treated him. The first was from the Naffa family, and was a close relative of his father’s friend George Naffa. The second was Ilyas Karam. The third was Philippe Gachet, the only one who did him any good. He didn’t treat him in Beirut. He treated him in Lyons, in France. The Shidyaq store is closed now. The place has been up for sale for years, but no one’s taken it. All the electrical boxes on this street have “Matanius” written on them in ink. Was that the name of the bill collector, or what? Maybe they all share a generator. He thinks about the tailor Shidyaq. His father was one of Shidyaq’s customers. He remembers a man in the neighborhood who died, and how the tailor made one last suit for him. They tried the suit on the dead man, but the pants were too long. The sons and daughters of the deceased insisted on the tailor coming and adjusting them while the father was lying in his coffin (Shidyaq hemmed the pants with a needle and thread).

Saman crosses the empty white plaza and takes the road beside the ruins of the City Palace Cinema. He passes behind the Lazariyyah Complex and then behind the “Teatro” Theater, which they haven’t finished restoring yet. He intentionally avoids passing through Amir Bachir Street and the Parliament District. That area is packed right now with friends and acquaintances of his, and he doesn’t want anyone derailing his exercise. He passes behind the car park and enters the street with iron roadblocks set up in front of the UN’s ESCWA building. Remembering he’s carrying a bag, he keeps away from the security men, passes the roadblock, and crosses the intersection in front of the Bladour Hummus, Bean, and Fattah Restaurant. He doesn’t go down the street with all the banks. He turns left toward the small statue of the painter Umar al-Unsi, whose likeness is standing there, painting beneath the acacias and sycamores while birds fly around it: they’d put some wooden birdhouses in the trees. Al-Unsi is facing the road. There are statues of gazelles around him as well. Saman Yarid passes in front of the water fountains beneath the Government Palace and quickens his pace even more. The endorphins are pumping through his veins now. The hormones of happiness. He feels like he’s taking off. His spirits are rising. The memory of last night fades away completely. Cecilia seemed to be feeling better on that last phone call as well. There were gardens beneath him. The smell of jasmine. Young men and women in the shade of the trees. Roman baths and ruins. People taking breaks from work and eating sandwiches. He turns near the Capuchin Franciscan Church. He looks at the church’s small round windows, and at those of the Government Palace. The Wadi Abu Jamil district appears. He recalls what it was like after the war. He used to come here and walk between the wrecked buildings. Emily came with him a few times. She’d bring her camera and jump through the rubble. She only joined him the first few times. They were still afraid of land mines back then. He keeps on walking in a straight line behind the Awdah Bank (the Awdah and Saradar Group): he wants to avoid the sidewalk beside the main road. He doesn’t want to come across anyone who might interrupt his swift progress. The villas are lined up above him in the shade of the Government Palace. He passes between two construction sites and thinks about how strange this city is. All these assassinations and explosions, all this tension, all this fear of falling back into civil war, and yet these buildings keep sprouting up. A whole city is rising up between the Bab Idris district and the ruins of the Saint Georges Hotel. A forest of buildings surrounded by green construction netting: inside the safety netting, workers are rushing around like ants, endlessly welding steel and carrying panes of glass. Machines are molding cement, cranes are hoisting rocks, and dust fills the sky. Endorphins fill his body, and the site of all this construction lifts his spirits. These rising buildings are a good omen, thinks Saman Yarid. Two new high-rises are going up not far from his house. Yarid Architecture did the initial designs. He and his cousin Antoine Khoury prepared the first design sheet. Each apartment is 6,000 square feet. The two towers are located at the intersection of Abd al-Wahab al-Inglizi and al-Doumani Streets, which descends toward Ghandour al-Saad Street. His cousin thought about buying one of the apartments. He changed his mind after Hariri was killed.

He swims for a full hour at the indoor pool of the Phoenicia Hotel. He takes a shower, and as he’s drying himself off realizes he forgot his deodorant at home. His muscles are trembling: a lovely feeling. He can swim more later. His father used to swim like a fish. And his grandfather used to go swimming in the sea in winter whenever the water was calm. He swam in the cold, and when he got out he always laughed at his chattering teeth. Mary’s a swimmer. And Emily too. Josephine was quicker than he was over a hundred meters. She still swims with him in his dreams. People used to think they were twins — her face looked strangely like his. But she was one year older. If she hadn’t left the house that day long ago, if she were still alive, how old would she be right now? 41. There are countless pictures of Josephine in the family photo albums. She loved having her picture taken. She was kidnapped on the demarcation line between East and West Beirut, at the crossing by the National Museum. That was all they ever found out about her.

He walks along the Manara corniche, near the old lighthouse, and looks at the sea. The place isn’t too crowded: night hasn’t fallen yet. At the edge of the path, men are dropping hooks into the sea. Fishing lines tied to blue handrails. A boy on a bike. Someone selling cakes with sumac and thyme. A man pushing a cart with bags of pistachios on it. There’s a big pot on another cart, the smell of fava beans wafting from it. Lemons are lined up, yellow and glistening, in front of the pot. Women are walking, their steps large and slow, their hair covered by head scarves. A cart laden with boiled cobs of corn. Steam rises over some men: a heated discussion. They’re talking politics. About what’s happening in the country. Mehlis is in Geneva to meet with Kofi Annan, but he’s coming back to Beirut tonight. Has he written the report? No. He hasn’t written it yet. A sea breeze starts up. There’s a strange smell in the air. He stops breathing in through his nose and quickens his pace. He should turn around and head back. If he walks anymore he’ll start sweating again. He’s walked and swam enough. He doesn’t want to wear himself out. He notices the people seem tense. Because it’s Ramadan. This is West Beirut: the people fast here. They’ve gone without food and drink from the morning till this very instant. That’s not easy.

He goes into McDonald’s to buy a half-liter bottle of water, and drinks it as he stands there looking through the window at the corniche and the cars and the sea. The time of the iftar meal is approaching. You can see it on the faces. In the way people are moving. He glances at the clock and walks outside again. The water has refreshed him. His body needed it. He can tell because he felt some tension in his eyes. It felt as if the muscles in his sockets had been contracting. He rushes across the road in front of the Phoenicia Hotel. The cars are coming out of the tunnel very quickly. He passes by the cylindrical pink hotel (the Monroe) and walks down Ahmed Shawqi Road, his gaze directed upward to the new hotel rising beyond the row of palm trees. Another cylindrical hotel, but in a different style: its summit resembles the sail of a ship. He once spent two nights in the Burj al-Arab hotel during a business trip to Dubai. He woke up early — he was used to sleeping in his own bed in the house on Ghandour al-Saad, with his head on his own pillow — and opened the blinds, and from the broad window he looked at the white sea stretching out before his eyes. It was like sleeping in a tower that rose from the heart of the sea. He had felt the same thing in a hotel in Marseille (the Radisson Blu). What’s keeping him in Beirut? Why doesn’t he leave for France, or Baltimore? What’s keeping him in this city? But he knows these paths so well. He’s lived his whole life here. He never once traveled far from Beirut without feeling as if he’d left half of himself behind, as if he were split in two. Half of him moving on the streets of New York or London or Tokyo or Lyon, and the half back in Beirut waiting for the rest of him. The half that moved through foreign cities was and was not happy. And the half waiting in the first city — in the house on Ghandour al-Saad — was neither happy nor unhappy. It was simply waiting. It wasn’t moving. It kept still, as if it were looking at a TV that had been turned off. It kept still as the days and nights went by, still as a plant, like a seedling waiting for someone to bring it water.

His colleagues all left. His relatives left. Mary left. So did Emily. His friends are planning to leave, and Yara wants to leave and never come back, provided she can find a country that will take her. Why is he clinging to these streets, why is he holding onto this city? What’s keeping him here? Salty humid air rustles through the palm trees. A friend of Emily’s (Claudette Saadeh) wrote her dissertation at the Sorbonne on the emigration from Mount Lebanon in the final decades of the 19th century. She noted that all the school books and Lebanese historians put forward a single theory: the mountain was poor, and the people needed money once the silk manufacturing trade there started to lose ground; and the need for money — for gold — drew the Lebanese overseas. Emily’s friend claims this theory overlooks one important factor: the civil wars around Mount Lebanon in the middle of the 19th century. The sectarian wars wrecked the villages there and led to foreign intervention, and ultimately to the setting up of the Mutasarrifate administration. During the Mutasarrifate era, there was peace on Mount Lebanon. And it was during this time of peace that the massive emigration to America and Africa began. The schoolbooks don’t mention this, but it’s important. People don’t leave their country in a time of war. First of all, it’s not easy to gather up your belongings and move to a far-off country during a war. Second, war breaks out as quick as lightning and doesn’t leave any room for thought. Third — and this is strange — people are able to acclimate themselves to war. In moments of extreme danger, glands in the brain are activated, triggering chemicals that help you face danger. Endorphins are one of those chemicals. There are scientists in America who have developed drugs for military use, drugs that block the soldiers’ fear of death during battle. Emily said her friend did a lot of research on those chemicals, and on those drugs. When you eat chocolate, you feel strength in your whole body. The same is true of hot peppers. It all comes from endorphins. Saman recalls his French doctor, who recommended that he exercise: he said walking quickly was better than running. The people of Mount Lebanon didn’t leave during the civil wars. They left in the time of peace that followed those wars. Why did they leave? Emily’s friend says it was fear. One’s fear of the future is greater after a catastrophe. Something similar happens after earthquakes. People are afraid of dark days returning. Fear is the main reason behind emigrations like these. Fear, and a loss of confidence in the place. If these places can burn down so quickly, virtually overnight, then how could you not be afraid? Rumors spread in the wake of wars, and so do nightmares. Lebanon is the largest market for antidepressants in the whole Middle East. Emily’s friend lives in Montreal now. She’s writing a book on the exodus from Beirut after the Civil War of the last quarter of the 20th century. The figures she has compiled show that almost a quarter of Lebanon’s population left the country for America, Europe, and Australia after the end of the war in 1990. Saman Yarid washes his face in the water of the fountain beneath the Government Palace.

It’s crowded in front of the ESCWA building. In the neighboring large public park, Gibran Garden, the tent is still standing: the families of the missing maintain their vigils here. Old women hold pictures of the missing: children and grandchildren and siblings and spouses who were lost at the end of the war. Fifteen years have gone by and the missing still haven’t come back. The old women are sitting on a bench beneath a small tree, its shadow still quite short. One of them is opening a package of bread. Another is opening a can of “Zwan” brand mortadella. The photos are up on a wooden board, and on the tent poles, and at the entrances to the tent, and inside the tent too. There are a lot of pictures here: a young man with long hair and sideburns wearing a white shirt with a high collar; a man laughing; a boy who looks about seventeen giving the victory symbol with his fingers; yellow photos whose color has faded.

Saman Yarid passes behind the renovated buildings. He needs to go home to shower and change before heading to Cecilia’s. The old women holding up photos in front of the statue of Gibran remind him of a house in the neighborhood, a house near the Afran al-Hayek Bakery. The house was boarded up in 1976: its family abandoned it during the Two-Year War and went abroad. No one’s entered it since. There are iron chains around the door. The windows are shuttered. Thistles have covered the entrance and crept up the stairs. Weeds have overrun the house’s garden. Countless birds fly up from the dry black trees: they hover around the new Hermitage Building and the stunted cypress trees planted on its roof. The birds trace dark circles in the air, then return to the abandoned garden.

~ ~ ~

I can see you from here, Saman. I can see you beneath the Roman goblets carved into the stone wall above the fountains. You can’t see me as you wash your face and feel a bit of pain in your muscles, but I see you. I see you standing in front of the old house with the arches and green shutters, looking at it, then turning around to look at the many stories of the Al-Murr Tower. The house is abandoned, and so is the tower. The city’s been filled with shuttered houses for thirty years, uninhabited buildings that no one sees, hidden behind people’s homes, hidden away on side roads — but even the locked-up houses you can see on the main roads seem invisible. The eye has grown used to seeing those trees, those closed shutters. The eye glides over the rooftops without a thought. Empty houses, at once visible and invisible. And up in the trees, sparrows build their nests.

On the road from the Al-Murr Tower to the Banque du Liban (in the Hamra district), the many abandoned buildings hide behind high walls. These walls keep the eyes away, but time has pierced their iron gates. If you look through the many holes, you can see crumbling mansions, and stairs rising into darkness, and thistles sprouting through the stairs and climbing the desiccated trees. Why are these buildings still closed? Here and there, scattered construction sites can be seen: noise and dust and activity.

Do you remember Salim Surour’s house, behind the Government Palace? A three-story brick building, do you remember? It was destroyed in the war, and not a single brick remained. But a picture of it was preserved on a postcard. And now they’re building it again, from that picture. She can almost see the postcard on the architects’ table, right beside the plans. They’re building it just like it used to be before the war. If it weren’t for that picture, for that postcard, would anyone remember it? Would they be rebuilding it? Tomorrow, when the house is finished, its new occupants will sit on the third-floor balcony and look at the windows and bricks of the Government Palace. And if they turn their eyes a bit, they’ll see a modern building with green windows: that one houses the Japanese Embassy.

I see you all by yourself, Saman. You want to know what binds you to this city, but you don’t know. It’s like your guts are tied to Beirut’s, and you don’t know why. You go your way while your eyes drink in the buildings and the streets, the city’s hidden nooks. Wrought iron doors. Polished walls. How many cities are hidden in the belly of this one city? At rare times, you see all of those cities together. At night, when you push the window open, outward, and hear the wooden shutters bang against the wall and then retreat into the darkness, your heart jumps. It doesn’t jump because of the sound of wood striking wood: you’re not scared of that noise. You’re not scared it will wake up the naked woman under the sheets. Like you, she drank a lot before going to sleep. You can tell she’s sound asleep from her breathing. Even if they started shelling the city right now, she still wouldn’t open her eyes. “And if it weren’t for my headache, I wouldn’t have woken up.”

Your heart jumps when you push the shutters outward, revealing the lights of the city. The sea appears — a portion of the sea — in the glow of the streetlamps. The sea looks like a black mirror reflecting the lights beneath the black mountain. You look at the mountain, you look at the locked-up dump site, and you remember what you read in the paper about the giant rat living in the landfill’s belly.

If a person dies before their time has come, some life is still left within them. What do they do with the rest of their life when they’re dead? The life that’s left over won’t let them rest.

This room is as long as a tunnel. I’m sitting at the end of it and writing to you. There are books on the shelves around me — this place is full of books. It’s a library. There are white stone walls and red wooden bookshelves. An old man comes over from time to time and places a cup of water in front of me. He doesn’t distract me from my work. He doesn’t say a word. Sometimes he comes over and sets down the cup without my realizing it: I’m so immersed in writing that I often don’t notice the outside world. You go to a far-off place when you write, a place only you have access to; and if what you’ve written is good, a day comes when others enter that place as well. But you don’t think of them while you’re writing. You think of words. Your head surges, then abates. One moment the images and memories flow one after the other, and the next moment they’re gone. Darkness, then light. And you’ve got to be ready. You’ve got to work harder. This pain in your eyes, this headache that envelops the brain: it’s all a small price to pay. We don’t do anything else here. Reading. And writing. Reading is more important than writing. All of us here read. And for all of us a day comes when we write. On a single page, you write the story of your life from beginning to end.

I came here when I was young. I used to think I was a “young woman.” How could I not be a young woman if I was studying engineering in college and had a boyfriend who loved me and who’d fight to keep me in his bed night after night after night. He used to take me out to eat, to the movies, to the sea, to the ski resorts of Faraya; and he used to take me to his apartment. He’d cook me delicious meals and shower me with gifts. I haven’t forgotten the things he used to do for me, the things he used to do with me. How could I forget? When I close my eyes now, I can still see his fingers, his shoulders, his back, even his feet. How could I forget?

The blows on my head. Why were they beating me? I was afraid of tearing my dress, afraid they’d rip the clothes I loved, afraid of their eyes and teeth and hands. I couldn’t believe it when they slammed my head against the wall. I remember the searing pain in my nose, the pain between my eyes. It’s a distant memory, but it’s still there, it hasn’t disappeared. My limbs gave out under me like water, and I collapsed. I thought I’d be left alone now. Or maybe that they’d rip off my clothes and have their way with me. But none of them ripped off my clothes. The green blouse. The gray wool skirt with blue polka dots. A gift. I didn’t buy that skirt. The blouse wasn’t a gift. I bought it myself, in Brussels. I remember the rain that day. And I remember — while our bags were full — how we stood in front of the restaurants on the wide cobblestone plaza, the rain streaming from the sloping rooftops and forming ever-larger puddles. The restaurants opened onto the alleyways in front of them, and men were cooking in giant pots. A festival of food and drink. A man was pouring a bottle of wine into a wide pot, and with his other hand he held a wooden spoon and stirred some mashed potatoes with milk and mushrooms. Behind him another man was slicing off strips from some pork that was slowly being grilled. A crowd of breath and steam and music. The green blouse was in the red bag with the store logo on it. We laughed as we drank red wine and ate slices of roasted meat from a carton with a cellophane cover. We ate with white plastic forks and knives. The meat came first. Then the deep dishes of potatoes puréed in wine. We ate standing. The tall circular tables looked like wine barrels. The music blended in with the murmur of the rain, with the laughter, with the flushed and happy faces, with the water dripping from the rooftops. What was I wearing? Velvet pants stained with rainwater. I remember how the spots of rain spread on those pants. I remember the warmth of the food. I remember how tired my legs were from walking through all the shops. We’d been walking since morning. I remember the wine: the taste is still in my mouth. I feel the need to cry as I write these words. But I don’t cry. I look at my wool skirt, the gray skirt with blue polka dots, I look at it and I don’t cry. I came here wearing it. And I’m still wearing it. All of these years and it hasn’t worn out. Clothes don’t wear out here.

The blows to my head. An awful one against my right ear. Then my head on the tiles. Maybe they weren’t tiles, the room might have had a concrete floor, I don’t know. But I remember the ice rising from the ground and into my face. That’s the last thing I remember from the land of the living. Blood was pouring out of my nose, out of my ears, out of my eyes, and ice was rising from the ground and piercing my head, my fingers, my stomach, my mouth. My tongue froze. I wanted to say something, but the cold shut me up. I trembled as the ice took hold of my face and darkness filled my eyes. Then I faded off.

The cold. That’s the last thing I remember from the land of the living.

~ ~ ~

I open my eyes and see the moon, white and round against the dark blue sky, and know I am not dead. I opened my eyes and saw the moon, white and round against the dark blue sky, and knew I wasn’t dead. I wasn’t dead. That was the night sky. And that was the full moon shining down on the sleeping city. I was not dead, but where was I? And what was that horrible pain in my head? Pain? No, not pain. The memory of pain. It wasn’t pain anymore, merely something like a ringing in my eardrum, there where the last blow landed. I wanted to wipe the blood from my nose, but it had dried. The blood on my hair was dry too. My hair was all tangled up, and had become as stiff as dry dough. I rubbed at the dried blood in my hair, but it didn’t come off. It stuck to my head like glue.

I wasn’t dead, but where was I? I closed my eyes and felt a movement in the darkness, and a blanket fell over me. I could tell it was a wool blanket even before I opened my eyes. Who threw me that cover while I lay out in the open air? I did not know.

I wanted to move, to get up, but my body was heavy. They’d beaten me for a long time. With the butts of their guns. With wooden sticks that looked like table legs. And they’d kicked me with massive boots. Why did they beat me? Tell me what you want, I said to them, don’t beat me. My family has money. Don’t beat me. Call this number and give them my name and tell them you. A man punched me in the mouth. He broke some teeth. He broke a single tooth, but I thought I could feel all my teeth come loose and almost fall from my mouth. He punched me again, and all I could think of was spitting: I was afraid I’d swallow the tooth.

All of that was over now. I opened my eyes and touched the blanket, and felt that I was warm. Where was my green blouse? Why had they taken my green blouse? At least they had left me my short gray undershirt. And the skirt? The skirt was there too. I could feel it scrunched up beneath me. I should get up. The ground was muddy. And I could see — far away — mustard-colored eyes staring at me. Whose eyes were they? Rabbits? Mice? Dogs? Where was I?

I managed to get up, even though my body was half-shattered. I suddenly felt extremely thirsty. When had I last had something to drink? When did they kidnap me? Last night? Two nights ago? Three? Or was it more? Or less? I wanted to remember, but all of my memories seemed far off, seemed to come back to me from a distance, like the streets of Brussels. That end-of-summer vacation. I was so full of joy as I wandered freely through the endless shops, one after the other. The suitcases couldn’t possibly hold all those clothes. I bought so much stuff for myself, and a lot of presents for everyone else. I didn’t watch the news on TV in the evenings. In a few days we’d be back Beirut, drowning in its news. Right now I was enjoying my time; enjoying the food, and the company, and the shopping; seeing the sights; and looking at the doves and pigeons in the squares. Look, Philippe said, all of them have red feet, the white doves, and the gray and black pigeons too — they’ve all got red feet, look!

Now all I could see was the moon, as white as cotton, a full circle, like a giant eye watching me from above. The city stretched out on this side, and on the other, still, dead, silent. There were no televisions flickering in the windows; there were no bullets being sprayed into the sky. Where was I? I suddenly knew where I was: I could see the Roman columns and the cypress trees and the steps of the National Museum. I was at the crossing by the museum! I was on the demarcation line between East and West Beirut. I’d been here when a voice shouted out behind me. I’d been here when I saw masked men running toward me. At first I didn’t see the machine guns in their hands. And then I did. Were they wearing masks, or did they have bags over their heads? What happened after that?

I felt extremely thirsty. How many nights had I spent with them? What did they do to me after I lost consciousness? I couldn’t remember anything. I ran my hand over my body and felt cold. Cold? No, not cold, rather the memory of feeling cold. I didn’t feel cold now, the feeling of cold was over. Where should I go?

Should I circle around the drums and barricades and head up the road to the Hôtel-Dieu Hospital, to Achrafieh? There’s sniper fire on those streets. From where I was standing, I could see the moon reflected on the windows of Achrafieh, the windows of the tall buildings. Why did the city seem so abandoned, so black?

I wanted to circle around the barricades, but phosphorescent eyes appeared above the sandbags and bags of cement. I moved away in fear. I had to be careful. To move in a straight line. To not enter the other side by mistake. The white moon lit up the roads and barricades, the buildings and dusty trees. I couldn’t hear a sound. It was as if I’d gone deaf.

I walked along the demarcation line from the museum to Sodeco Square. It took me an hour, or two, or three — I don’t know. It might have only taken the blink of an eye. Where was time? The moon was motionless. A cloud passed in front of it, covering me in darkness, and I no longer knew where to set my feet. Then the cloud left the moon’s face, faded away, and white light poured onto that furrowed pockmarked street. I saw the white bones of men. I saw a dead donkey, the flies congregating on its belly. But the flies were silent. They weren’t buzzing. They were green and noiseless. Bats passed through the silver air and disappeared among the pine trees at the racetrack. The city was silent, dead. West Beirut was dead. So was East Beirut. Where had everyone gone? Even at night, you could always hear voices, you could see the flames and lights, you could hear the TVs and radios, the cars, the wheels of the armored vehicles on the pavement, the shells, the booming of the anti-aircraft guns. Where were the city’s people? Where were their voices?

I wanted to enter East Beirut. From here — at the Sodeco crossing — I could see the Nasra Tower. The moonlight shone on that giant specter of a building, its walls riddled with artillery holes. I could see a sycamore in front of it. I saw nocturnal birds lighting on the asphalt. What birds were those? I didn’t know what they were called. From there I could see the Furn al-Nasra Bakery. I saw the barricades — barricades and roadblocks. But I could not see the guards. I saw neither soldiers nor civilians. I only saw those yellow eyes near the ground. They were far off. Were they rats? The moonlight didn’t reach them. It was as if their bodies were planted in the ground. I was too afraid to draw any nearer. They were watching me. And they were following me, from the one side of the city, and from the other. At first I didn’t notice. And then I did. Even over there — on the western side — those yellow holes were crawling along after me. Where could I escape?

I realized I couldn’t escape. I realized those eyes were leading me somewhere. The road descended, so I followed it between two rows of collapsing buildings, between wrecked shops and burning cars, until I reached a muddy patch of swampland that stretched from beneath the Fuad Shihab Bridge to just in front of the ruined City Palace Cinema. The swamp’s surface reflected the moonlight. Although it was mud, it shone like a mirror. Mosquitoes were hovering just above it, but I couldn’t hear them. I pulled the blanket around my body, and did not move. I felt no pain in any of my limbs, but I did feel thirsty. My mouth was parched, as if my tongue were made of wood.

The strange thing was that there was no fear in me. The city seemed dead; I was alone in the night beneath that strange white moon; those dark eyes were following me; my blouse was gone; my head was covered in dried blood. But I felt no fear within me. How could that be? I didn’t think about my father, or my mother, or my siblings. I was standing by the half-ruined steps beneath the Fuad Shihab Bridge and looking at the mosquitoes on the swamp’s surface, and I felt no fear. The moon gleamed on the mud — mud as still as ice. The light shone on its glassy surface. I wasn’t thinking of my boyfriend or my last vacation in Brussels or the green blouse I’d lost. The dome of the Opera Cinema appeared, half-black, in the distance. What happened to it? I wondered. Had it been burned by the shelling? Why wasn’t it green anymore? But nothing really disturbed me except my thirst. My thirst and my confusion. I was confused because I didn’t know where the fighters were, where the people of the city were. Had the shelling grown worse while I was kidnapped? Had the people moved even farther away from the demarcation line? Had the areas near the line been burned and destroyed? Where did the desolation end? How many hours would I have to walk before I found people? And how could I proceed if those yellow eyes kept blocking the way? Was I afraid of them?

I realized I wasn’t afraid of them. It wasn’t fear that was standing in my way. It was the memory of fear. There was no fear anymore. I wasn’t afraid. I pulled the blanket around my shoulders, turned around, and started walking toward the east, toward the Monot district. The yellow eyes seemed to be receding. They seemed to recede as I advanced. Was that real, or was I just imagining it?

I walked toward East Beirut, but did not reach it. How was that possible? I walked and walked, but I was still by the stairs beneath the bridge. How?

Before I understood what was happening, I saw a ghost, a shadow behind some pillars. The shadow emerged and drew nearer. It wasn’t a ghost. I knew that man. I’d seen him before, but where? I couldn’t remember. Maybe at the university. Maybe in school. Maybe at the movies. Maybe somewhere in town. I couldn’t remember where I’d seen his face, but it was familiar. I wasn’t afraid of him. And I thought he might be able to help me go back home. The house wasn’t far from here. I just had to go up into Monot and turn left on Saint Joseph University Street, then turn right, then left again, and I would be on Ghandour al-Saad Street. It would only take a few minutes. But I was stuck beneath this bridge, between East and West Beirut — as if I were tethered to the ground.

As he approached, I noticed the man looked old. He wasn’t old, but he seemed ancient. He looked a bit like my father. A distant resemblance, but there all the same. I told him I’d been kidnapped and they’d left me by the museum with this blanket. I told him I’d walked here from the museum, and my house was nearby.

He asked, what’s your name?

Josephine, I said, my name’s Josephine Yarid.

Look at my face, he replied, don’t you recognize me?

I said I’d seen him before, had seen him several times, but couldn’t remember where.

Look at my face, he said, and imagine me with white hair — not black like this, but white.

I said I was tired, I said I was thirsty — so tired and thirsty I couldn’t think straight, and couldn’t imagine him with white hair. But I’ve seen you before, I said, and I know you.

I wanted him to help me. To pick me up and carry me home. I wanted him to pick me up and carry me in his arms like a child — I wanted him to take me to my family. Why doesn’t he carry me home? I wanted to open my eyes and see myself back on the familiar sofa in my own familiar house again. To open my eyes and see the faces I knew looking back at me. I wanted them to look at me and tell me I’d come back, tell me I’d been saved. Why wasn’t he taking me home right then and there?

I stared at him and noticed that he looked like my brother — he didn’t just look like my father, he looked like Saman as well. But he wasn’t Saman. This man was older than my brother. I’ll try to picture him with white hair, I thought. And then he spoke again.

“Josephine, I’m your grandfather.”

At that moment, I knew I was dead.

~ ~ ~

“Am I dead, grandfather?”

“That’s right, Josephine.”

“I’m dead?”

“This is the land of the dead.”

That’s right. I remembered his voice. That was my grandfather’s voice. And that was his face. But the hair had thrown me off: I was used to seeing him with white hair; he looked so different with black hair.

He picked me up, and I collapsed into his arms. My body was weak. Sleep was weighing on my eyelids. He said I was tired from all the walking, and because I had woken up early. He said I should get some sleep. He said there was still blood in my body, I hadn’t slept enough. Sleep, Josephine, he said, sleep now, and don’t think about things. He said the blood was still thick in my body — that’s why I’d kept walking and walking, and why I felt so tired.

“Sleep now.”

His voice was soothing, but I was too worked up to sleep. What was bothering me so much? The dried blood in my hair? The dirt on my skin? What was keeping me from falling asleep in his arms? This was my grandfather. Yes. Even if he had dyed his hair black. This was my grandfather. I knew him. What was bothering me, then? I opened my eyes and saw the place was growing darker. The moon was gone, but a handful of stars had appeared in the sky. Stars and clouds and fog. The fog was seething like milk on the fire: I saw it rise and swallow the stars one after the other. We were moving. My grandfather was carrying me in his arms. Where was he taking me? I felt us going up some steps, then going down some steps. Where was he taking me? I saw what looked like two candles approaching. Someone was emerging from the dense night, someone quite short. Then I realized those weren’t candles. I was looking at the eyes of an animal. An invisible animal? No, there it was — a black animal. As black as this darkness.

“This is the land of the dead.”

The animal drew closer. It was a rat, a giant rat. I squirmed like a fish on dry land. I writhed in the arms of my grandfather, who was still moving forward, unafraid of the terrifying rat.

“Don’t be afraid, Josephine.”

I wanted to say something, but horror seized my throat.

I looked into my grandfather’s eyes and pleaded with him: “No, grandfather, no.” He looked at me. No sound had left my throat, but he looked me in the eyes and heard what I was saying. I was speaking within my heart. And my grandfather — because he was grandfather — heard me.

He stopped moving forward, and the huge rat froze in its place as well. My grandfather said things I did not understand. Don’t be afraid of the rat, he said, you needn’t feel scared. There’s a lot of life left in your body. You’re dead now, but there’s still life in your body. You won’t rest with all that life left inside you. This rat is here for our sake, Josephine. Don’t be afraid.

“No,” I said.

The rat retreated, but it wasn’t long before it appeared again. It approached and opened its jaws. I saw its teeth, white tinged with yellow. Ivory white. My grandfather said I should sleep: Why don’t you sleep?

“No,” I said. “Grandfather, no.”

There was still some spirit in me. I had bled out my blood — there was none left in my body — so where had this spirit come from?

“All right,” my grandfather said, and led me away from the rat. I followed him toward some lit-up houses.

~ ~ ~

A row of lit-up stone houses. Evergreen cypress trees swaying in the night. I heard the wind, and the sound it made as it struck the branches. I heard my grandfather breathing heavily. We’d come a long way, and he’d been walking uphill with me in his arms.

An old woman was waiting for him in a lit doorway. She was emaciated: skin stretched over bone. She was holding a tray with pitcher of lemonade and some cups. I said I was thirsty.

“Drink, my girl. You’ve come a long way. Drink.”

I drank a cup, then shyly held it out to her. She poured me another. My grandfather joined me, but only drank a single cup. I drank two, and wanted to ask for a third, but didn’t. What was this thirst? The cold taste in my mouth. And the smell in my nose. Lemon and water and sugar. The smell of rosewater as well, but weak. No. Not a smell. The memory of the smell of lemonade. It seemed nothing like the taste I knew, but somehow reminded me of it.

A young woman came out of the house. She was wearing striped pajamas, like those of a man. Her neck was pure white, but a scar as black as coal — the black of dried blood — crossed her neck from one side to the other. She noticed me staring at her scar and, embarrassed, did up the top button of her pajamas with her hand.

My grandfather disappeared from sight. The young woman said there was hot water in the bathroom. I could sense my grandfather had not gone far. He must have entered one of the nearby houses. The lights were on in those houses: yellow poured through the windows and fell in rectangles on the grass. I could hear voices inside, but they were low, like whispering. The old woman smiled as I entered the house. The books were the first things to catch my eye: the shelves were covered in them.

There was a long passageway between the rooms. The young woman led me down it to the bathroom. I entered and closed the door behind me. It wasn’t very big, but it was comfortable. I turned on the shower, first the blue faucet and then the red one, and the sweet warm water began to come down. I took off my clothes. I put my skirt on top of a tall table in the corner. I put the rest of my clothes on the edge of an empty bamboo laundry hamper beside the table. And I folded up the blanket and set it against the door, so that if any one tried to come in by mistake it would block their way, or at least hinder them a bit. But I wasn’t really worried someone would come in. I did that automatically, without thinking. I simply folded the blanket and set it down against the door. The water was pouring out of the shower and onto my head, dripping onto my forehead and face, onto my neck, my breasts, my stomach, my legs. It flowed over me as I closed my eyes: I didn’t want to see the black mixing in with the water as it went down the drain. I wanted that water to clean me while I slept. I spent a long time in the shower. I rubbed my body with a bar of fragrant baladi soap. The smell of that lather (olive oil and other aromas) filled my nose, and did not fill it. It was as if I were remembering the smell of that soap. But I was clean again. The water had washed away the dried blood on my face. My hair was clean. I found a comb, and as I was combing my hair, I felt some pain on one side of my head, where they had struck my ear. I also felt some pain in my right thigh. I leaned over to inspect it and discovered a bruise, blue. The water grew colder. I turned off the blue faucet, and the water was warm once more. I washed my head one last time as the water went cold for good.

I got out of the shower and dried myself off with a large towel that hung from a nail by the sink — had the towel been put there for me? I wanted to see my face, but there was no mirror above the sink, or anywhere else in that bathroom. What should I wear? My clothes were filthy. I filled the sink with water and washed my clothes with soap, then wrung them out and put them on. I shook out the blanket and picked up the dirt that had fallen from it to the floor. I tried to clean up the place as best I could. There was a knock at the door. The voice was not that of the old woman. It was the younger one. She was beautiful: her face fair and slender, with brown shoulder-length hair. She looked liked a French actress I loved, but whose name I couldn’t remember. Emily always made fun of how I forgot actresses’ names. She said I remembered the names of the actors — the men — but not the women. Emily.

The woman spoke from behind the door. She said she hadn’t put a broom or mop in the bathroom so that I wouldn’t wear myself out trying to clean it. She also said she had some clothes for me: I could put them on now, and she would wash my own clothes. I cracked open the door slightly, then opened it all the way. I told her I’d already washed my clothes and put them on. She laughed, and looked a bit confused. I saw she was holding a blue blouse and a yellow skirt. I said I was fine, but that there was some dirt on the floor from my blanket.

“It’s not my blanket, actually. They wrapped me up in it and left me.”

“Try to forget that,” she said. “Don’t think about it.”

A pleasant smell wafted in from the end of the corridor, and the old woman called out. Her voice wasn’t all that loud, but I could still hear her call. I headed in its direction and came to the kitchen: a white sink, white cabinets, and a wooden table with a white cloth over it. The tablecloth was embroidered with small blue flowers. I’ve made you an omelet, the old woman said; I’ve made you some eggs with onions and parsley and fennel. In the sink I could see a round tray with what was left of the washed green fennel on it. The old woman approached with a ceramic frying pan and flipped the omelet onto a glass plate. I could hear the oil boiling within the puffy steaming eggs. At that moment I noticed the hunger tearing through my body. The whole time — while I was walking along the demarcation line — I’d been thirsty, I’d been thinking about water, about how badly I needed to drink something. But I’d been hungry too. I hadn’t eaten since they’d kidnapped me. What had the woman with the scar on her neck said to me? “Try to forget that. Don’t think about it.”

There was a basket of bread on a small table beside the larger one. A white cloth had been folded over once and was covering the bread. Had it been folded like that so that I’d see the brown bread and know to eat it?

The old woman approached, took out some of the bread and put it in front of me, and told me to eat. She said she hadn’t put much salt on the omelet, but there was salt on the table. She pushed a small white plate toward me: salt covered one half of it, and some spice covered the other. I could smell cinnamon. Or rather, it was as if I were smelling cinnamon: I saw the spice’s color and imagined the smell of cinnamon.

Will you eat with me? I asked.

She said she’d eaten a little while ago, but.

She stopped mid-sentence, got up, and brought over a jug of water and two clean cups from near the sink. She filled my cup, and hers.

“I’ll drink with you. And you, have some water and eat before the eggs get cold. This is whole grain bread — it’s delicious. Eat, my girl.”

I ate the omelet and drank one cup of water after another. While I was eating, the young woman came and sat down with us. She had brought her own glass of water. We sat around the table and drank without speaking. The very last bite from my plate quenched my hunger. I knew my stomach was full. I could feel it swelling against my undershirt. The damp fabric was clinging to my stomach, but I didn’t feel cold. The place was warm. The younger woman looked at the empty chair beside her. I later realized she was reading a book that was open on the chair — I couldn’t see the book from where I was sitting.

I thanked the old woman for the omelet. I wanted to wash my plate, but she said that wasn’t necessary right now. She said I should rest: I’d come a long way, and it was best for me not to tire myself out anymore.

The young woman took me to a room with a bed. There was a dresser with a book and a small mirror on it. The woman said good-night and left, closing the door behind her. I was alone under the yellow overhead light. I walked, half-asleep, to the small mirror and picked it up. But before I did so, I noticed my clothes had dried against my skin. Maybe they weren’t completely dry, but I couldn’t feel much moisture now. The most important thing was that I was feeling better. After the shower and food and water, after seeing the young woman’s serene face as she read the book — after all of that — I was feeling better. Some of my fatigue had left me, and I was, to a certain extent, feeling relaxed.

I looked in the mirror and saw my face, that familiar visage. True, that face I knew so well looked a little tired, especially under the eyes, but I was all right. The blue beneath my eyes was from my lack of sleep. I hadn’t slept at all the whole time I was kidnapped. I was too afraid. The fear was incredible. “Try to forget that. Don’t think about it.” That’s right. That’s what the woman had said. I examined my face in the mirror and discovered a dark bruise on my ear and cheek where the last blow had landed. The bruise was black, not blue. It was under the skin. I thought about rubbing some ointment on it. But even with ointment, it would take at least a few days to disappear. “Maybe weeks,” I thought.

~ ~ ~

Cecilia and Saman see each other every night: on Monday, on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday. It’s now the morning of Sunday, October 16th, 2005, and they’re supposed to meet tonight as well. Cecilia leaves work before nine. These days the Monoprix is open until 11:30, but she leaves before the supermarket shuts its doors because no one comes and orders food from the kitchen after the iftar meal. Anything ordered after six o’clock is pre-made — Cecilia doesn’t stay in the kitchen. She’s exhausted. She’s been rushing around since the morning, and is out of breath by the evening. Her fingers hurt. Her limbs are numb. She walks slowly now, as if nails had been driven into her feet. Yet despite all this, she feels relaxed once she makes it home. She takes two Panadols and sits down with Saman. They eat and talk. They watch TV and tell each other about their days.

Saman is learning to cook now. He says the time has come, and laughs. Cecilia says men start growing up at forty. Saman replies that people say men start becoming ignorant at that age. Cecilia says they only become ignorant if they’re married, but those who aren’t married are blessed, and learn how to cook.

Saman never spends the night at her place. He stays there until midnight, until one o’clock in the morning. Sometimes he stays until two. They hear a rooster crowing for dawn, and are amazed there’s a rooster in this city. Cecilia doesn’t spend the night with Saman when they have dinner at his place. She stays there until midnight, until one. Sometimes she stays until two. They hear the old clock strike twice in the large parlor: That’s our rooster, Saman says. She never goes home alone. Saman drives her in the Dodge. They don’t walk there, even though it’s nearby. On foot, if he’s by himself, he covers the distance in ten minutes. With her, it takes fifteen. But after midnight he doesn’t take her home on foot. They take the car. There are soldiers and security at the intersections. Beirut is on its guard these days. The Mehlis Report will be out in less than a week. People are tense. A sense of anticipation reigns over the city. The owners of the smaller shops aren’t restocking. Canned goods disappear from the shelves, which then remain empty — the shopkeepers are afraid to buy more goods right now. Saman asks the owner of the corner store why his shelves are empty. The shopkeeper says all hell’s going to break loose.

A few nights ago — this past Tuesday evening — the two of them were eating griddled chicken with potatoes and a fattoush salad, and drinking arrack. Cecilia made the fattoush. But Saman made the griddled chicken: he cleaned the chicken; he rubbed oil on the griddle; he sliced the potatoes; he peeled the garlic; he lit the oven. The two of them were laughing as she kept telling him to pay attention to this, or to be careful of that. She gave him instructions while he kept saying: I know, I know, do you really think I don’t know that? And their laughter grew louder as they drank the arrack mixed with ice water.

She asked about his day, and he said Roger had come by and they’d had a coffee at the Étoile, and that politicians and journalists at the next table over were talking about Mehlis.

She said everyone at Monoprix was talking about Mehlis. Mehlis and the ship at the port. And she told him the man in charge of the produce section said the UN was now saying it was going to extend the investigatory commission’s term so as to trick the people who blew up the cars: that way they won’t blow up a lot of cars right now, that way they won’t feel under pressure before the report is issued.

Saman laughed, replying that the people at the Étoile were saying similar things.

On Wednesday night he said: Tonight I’m going to learn how to cook Japanese. Cecilia laughed until her sides split. Saman asked if she was shirking her duties.

She taught him instead how to make potato salad. She said it was like fattoush, but that you use boiled potatoes rather than toasted pita bread. He smiled as they tasted the salad they’d made together: it was delicious.

“Nothing’s easier than making salad,” he said as he helped himself to a second serving.

They laughed and forgot everything that had happened that day. After the meal, they turned on the TV for a quarter hour. The news had been the same all day: the suicide of the Syrian Interior Minister, General Ghazi Kanaan; Pakistan’s concern about aftershocks following the earthquake; the Brazilian ship with seven thousand cows on board leaving the port of Beirut after a warning from the municipality; Bayern Munich was preparing for a match against.

Thursday night she taught him how to make spaghetti with tomatoes, basil, and olive oil.

Friday night she taught him how to make bean stew. If you learn to make a single type of stew, she said, you can cook them all.

She didn’t give him a cooking lesson on Saturday night. She said she was tired. She’d been cooking all day. She can’t set foot in the kitchen right now. I’ll go in alone, Saman replied, and make you some stuffed eggplant.

They didn’t stay in that night. They went out in the city. The ABC Mall was teeming with people. “They’ll be leaving soon,” thought Saman. The people were afraid to gather in places like that too late at night. On the radio he had heard — while he was running his car in the garage to charge the battery — an announcement from the Interior Ministry asking anyone who had information about the explosions to call this number. The announcement added that whoever called would be compensated.

He sat with Cecilia on the lower level of the ABC Mall, beside the fountain. The murmuring waters. Ham sandwiches with lettuce, tomatoes, pickles, and mustard were wrapped up in the refrigerator. A woman holding a basket of bread was standing behind the fridge and talking to a younger woman wearing the restaurant uniform. Saman ordered a turkey sandwich on oat bread. Cecilia ordered some ice cream. She said she’d had enough food this week. And she said she’d noticed that all the women broadcasters on TV were getting fat these days. All of them. On the LBC channel, on Lebanon Television, on Al-Mustaqbal, on New TV — all of those women had put on weight recently, haven’t you noticed? She had seen them that very morning: they looked happy, but fat. Especially the weather broadcasters. The forecast was for rain that night, and tomorrow as well. Autumn would begin in Beirut that week.

What does autumn have to do with how fat the broadcasters are? Saman asked. Nothing, Cecilia replied. She said they were gaining weight because they were anxious. I open the fridge whenever I’m anxious, she said. And she said those same women were happy about the coming rain: “The temperature will drop if it rains, and we can start putting on our winter clothes.”

After they’d finished eating, they took the escalator to the upper level. Cecilia said she was full from the ice cream. Saman pointed out all the steel that was used in the mall’s outer roofing — a series of small circular roofs suspended in the air like flying saucers. He said there was enough steel in this mall to build a whole skyscraper: a skyscraper without any glass at all, made of nothing but steel. Do you see all those beams?

They looked at the movie posters by the cinema. Let’s watch this one, Saman said, but Cecilia was feeling tired. Saman said it didn’t look like something worth watching anyway.

They didn’t stay out late. She had to get up early the next morning. When he got back home, as he was opening the door, he heard the phone ringing. He didn’t pick up. His cell phone started ringing a moment later. It was Gabe’s number. He picked up. Gabe invited him to the Shakespeare Bar on Monot Street. Saman told him he wasn’t alone right then. He was feeling sleepy. He stretched out on his side on the sofa to watch TV: a documentary about the reconstruction of Berlin after the Second World War. He’d seen this one before. Hadn’t it crossed his mind just two nights earlier? And tonight, as he was looking at the mall’s white metallic roofs, it had crossed his mind again. He changed the channel. A Chinese movie. Snow falling on men holding swords. A forest of red trees. He’d seen it before. He changed the channel and picked up one of the newspapers on the table. He read a bit to help him fall asleep. “I’ll read for a while and then go to bed,” he thought.

“After we contacted the parties involved, it became clear the smells descending on Achrafieh and Ain al-Mreisseh, and on other areas of the capital as well, were coming from a steamship called Kunouz — ‘Treasures’ — that belongs to the Rabunion Shipping Agency. The aforementioned steamship is carrying approximately seven thousand cows, transported from Brazil to Beirut and ordered by the Rasim Livestock Trading Company. ‘Treasures’ arrived in the port of Beirut last Saturday after a long journey in which it crossed the Atlantic and the Mediterranean. The trip lasted over fifteen days: the ship was not once cleaned in that time, and no one washed the cattle. The head of the Veterinary Quarantine Office at the Ministry of Agriculture, Dr. Fadlallah Mounir, said ‘the cows are in good health, and contrary to the rumors, none have died.’ Blood tests have been run on a sample of fifty of them, and none were found to be carrying any diseases. Dr. Mounir believes the smell is a result of ‘a failure to clean the steamship outside of territorial waters, before it entered the city’s port.’ We contacted the Ministry for the Environment, and they said they were following the matter and had lodged a written complaint. An official source at the Ministry of Health said ‘these smells are not harmful to the health of our citizens.’ And in a phone call with the firm that owns the ship, an employee said ‘the company is sorry for the inconvenience’ and informed us that these cows came directly from fields in Brazil, and that a shipment of similar size would be arriving next month. And an employee at the Beirut Municipality assured us that the head of the Municipality ‘was informed about what happened the day before yesterday, and has been following the matter with the utmost interest and concern.’”

Saman put down the paper. On one of the satellite channels, there was a program about the latest developments in Lebanon: Now that Mehlis has arrested the four generals formerly in charge of the Lebanese security apparatus and put them behind bars, what will his next step be? Will Mehlis accuse any non-Lebanese nationals of planning the assassination of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri? Why has the UN extended the term of the investigation commission? What deal has Washington offered to Syria? Will the assassinations start up again in Beirut? Who’s the next target? Why is the Maronite Patriarch Nasrullah Safir defending the President of the Republic against calls for his resignation? What’s the relationship between Iraq and Lebanon at this turning point in the region’s history? What role have the Palestinian refugee camps played? What did Prime Minister Siniora say to Condoleezza Rice in New York? What’s the connection between Syrian General Ghazi Kanaan’s suicide and his testimony before the investigating commission? Will Mehlis tell the whole truth on October 21st, or will he select only those parts of it that will guarantee international stability.?

~ ~ ~

We have televisions here. In every house, in every room, you might find a TV. When our longing for the land of the living grows too strong, we turn on the television and watch. Sometimes I cannot sleep. Visions, images of life pursue me: I toss and turn in my bed, unable to sleep. If the bed were narrower, as narrow as a coffin, would I sleep more easily, more deeply? I haven’t let the animal with the yellow eyes come near me and lick my wounds. It doesn’t even need to lick my wounds — it’s enough for it to smell me. Its nose alone can steal my scent. That rat eats what’s left of people’s souls. It drinks the blood left over in people’s veins. Without it, without the grace of its final visit, you cannot find peace in death. They kidnapped and killed me before I was even 22 years old. They beat me until I lost consciousness. Then they strangled me as I lay there. How had I suffocated in my sleep? How could I not have woken up when the air was cut off from my lungs? But that’s what happened. I died before my hour. A person lives 70 years. 80 years. 90. The average life expectancy of a woman in Beirut is 75. Six years longer than a man’s. I died while my body was still full of life. I passed away before my time, so how could my body not have a surplus? How can I sleep while the city sleeps, in this darkness?

Dreams accost me, or I feel as if I have to go to the bathroom, so I get up. And when I go back to bed I again find I’m unable to sleep. Every night I’m forced to get up and go to the bathroom. I drink a lot during the day. I drink all the time. I don’t know how many seasons have passed before my eyes here. (How many years have I been here? 22? 23? I arrived here in 1983. The years have flown by without my noticing. But I do notice. I notice at night. And during the day.) I don’t know how many winters have come and gone without my ever having quenched my thirst. The more water I drink, the thirstier I become. Other than that, there’s no suffering here. There’s no pain, no fear. You remember the fear you felt during your life. Along with the joy and the happy moments, you remember the fear. In the land of the living, fear drives you on from one hour to the next. It drives you from the bed to the sofa, and out to the street, to the restaurant, to friends, to family, to college, to the office, then back to bed once more. I used to be afraid my boyfriend didn’t love me as much as I loved him. Then I was afraid I didn’t love him at all. I used to love him, I slept with him, and my girlfriends were surprised that I would spend the night at his apartment when I was still so young. I’m not young, I told them, and when I’m with him I sink into him like a stone into water. At first I was afraid he didn’t love me as much as I loved him. Then I was afraid I didn’t love him. I had met another man. The man touched me with his fingers while he was speaking. A single touch of his fingers and I lost myself. A drop of sweat rolled down my side. Was I sweating from a single touch? It wasn’t sweat. A drop of something came from my body and rolled down my skin at the touch of his finger. What was that drop? I remember lying in the darkness with my boyfriend between my thighs, I remember pulling him toward me, but the touch of that other man’s finger was still on my skin. The finger had left me, and hadn’t. The man was inhabiting my night. Did I love my boyfriend or not? Did I want his touch right then or not? There I was pulling him toward me even as I thought I did not love him. I clung to him, used all my limbs to draw him into me; I called him toward me with my words, my fingers, the tips of my fingers; I welcomed him with my nails, with open flesh; I told him I loved him, thinking that I didn’t. Did I love him or not?

The night is long, and I have my fill of worries until the morning. Images from the land of the living pursue me, and I cannot sleep. I get up and turn on the television. I go to the bathroom, then back to the TV. I see my brother in it, up late at our house in Achrafieh. While Beirut sleeps, his eyes are open, looking at the television. Old newspapers are on the desk. The electric light casts its glow into the massive rooms. That high echoing ceiling I know so well. In the corner: the big clock that’s taller than my father. I remember the sound of the clock striking. I haven’t forgotten it. As I look at the television, longing fills my body. I’m here. Not there. I’m not in that house of ours whose every inch I still remember.

I crossed the river and did not cross it. My first night on this side, after I’d spent a long time staring at the black bruise on my cheek and ear, I sat down on the edge of the bed. The bed was soft, with clean blankets, and gave off a scent of lavender.

I know the smell of lavender. Whenever my grandmother took the winter clothes out of the wooden trunk — the one we used to called “grandma’s chest” — whenever she took out her wool skirts, the smell of lavender would fill the air. We had lavender plants beneath the oak tree. Three plants full of bracts, each plant looking like the tail of a peacock, rising under the sunlight, the bees feeding on them. Bees only feed on lavender blooms in the sunlight. Here we see the moon more than the sun. But we see the sun as well.

I remember the smell of lavender. I sat on the edge of the bed for a long time, unable to lay my body down, that familiar body on that unfamiliar wooden bed. The bed was firm but soft, as was the pillow. The bed was clean; the pillowcase pure white. All the covers had been washed. I was tired. Sleep was calling me to its kingdom, but I could not sleep. All that inner agitation, all that dark and disconcerting agitation within me: how could I sleep when there was so much I did not understand?

I sat for a long time on the edge of the bed and looked at things without seeing them. Where exactly was I? Of its own accord, my hand reached out to the book on the dresser. What book was this? I opened it and saw it was a Bible. I recognized it from its small black script, from the thin white paper, from the words that crossed into one another like two lines of ants. And I recognized it from the words written on its very first page: “The Holy Bible.”

I opened it and read: “He that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live.” I had read those words so often on the door of the church, and the door of my school, and even on the door of our house, but this was this first time in my life that I paid attention to their meaning. Before, I had not known what those words meant. When someone in our city died, we would write them at the top of the death announcements, above the time of the prayer for the person’s soul and the time of the funeral service, then hang the announcements up on walls all around the city. Instead of flowers, we would ask for donations to the church. “He that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live.” I read the words again and kept reading. I turned the book to another page, then jumped from page to page. I could feel tears in my eyes. Was it because of the light, or because I’d stayed up so late? I should sleep, I thought. I should rest for an hour. I’ll get a headache if I don’t sleep. But how could I sleep with all those things surging in my chest, swelling in my head?

I opened one of the dresser drawers and found more books. I picked up one that was bound in white, not black. A thick book like the others, but its cover wasn’t black — it was made of stiff white cardboard. I opened it and saw it was in English: The Iliad. I remembered that book from university. It was part of the curriculum for the “Civilizations” course, but I hadn’t read it. A blind Greek man called Homer had written it. I didn’t read it back then. He wrote it in Greek, not English, many centuries ago. Here — in the sleepless years — I read The Iliad in no time at all. I read it several times.

A wave of insomnia and longing has come over me, so I get up and head for the television. I see Saman, my brother, walking through the streets of Beirut. The streetlamps light up the city. People are moving on the sidewalks. The cafés on Sassine Square have begun to empty out. The people are going home early these days. They’re afraid of new explosions as the Mehlis Report approaches. I look at their faces. I observe their gestures as they say good-night to one another and get into their own cars. Car bombs have terrified the people of the city. Anyone could die just crossing the road, or getting out of a car, or getting into one. Death could come at any hour. The people are afraid. They feel a terrible fear in the days after an explosion. But as the explosion recedes, with each passing day, with each passing night of sleep, as it fades into the background, as time pushes it further and further into the past, the blast will fade, and people will no longer think of it all that much, and the fear will gradually fall from their hearts — as if the explosion hadn’t happened here, in this city. As if it had happened somewhere else.

Their faces are flushed from all the food and drink, all the dancing and laughter. A woman embraces a man at the edge of the sidewalk in front of Starbucks. The moon is in the sky, but the dazzling streetlights prevent the people of Beirut from seeing it. The sky is teeming with stars tonight, but the stars are unseen. They’ve vanished in a blanket of smog and humidity. The man is touching the woman’s bare back, pressing all ten fingers into her pale flesh. I see the marks his fingers leave on her. She’s like a fish sinking into his ribs. I hear her breathing, and I hear his. I grow weary as I look at them. I can feel myself emptying out, becoming hollow. TV gives me that feeling. It exhausts me. Books are better. The only time I ever feel as if I’ve crossed the demarcation line and returned to the land of the living is when I read. The TV screen keeps me from crossing over to the other side. But words do not.

I write as well. When the night’s silence disturbs my sleep, I get up and write. In Greek mythology there’s a river that separates the land of the dead from that of the living. I didn’t cross any rivers. There was no boat to ferry me from one bank to the other. But everyone has their river. Mine was the demarcation line between East and West Beirut. The demarcation line, and that muddy mosquito-infested swamp that stretched out from in front of the wrecked City Palace Cinema and almost — were it not for the distant ramshackle buildings — reached the edge of the sea. I watch Saman cross the swamp and see it has dried; it’s covered with white gravel and flooded with sunlight now. I no longer see the buildings pocked with bullet holes and torn apart by shells, the scorched structures with the wrecked husks of balconies and windows, their iron bars stolen during a moment of cease-fire between one round of shelling and another, and all the desks and furniture inside those buildings stolen before the iron rails of the balconies and windows and stairs, and the goods in the shops on the ground floors stolen as soon as the war began, before those shops were burned to conceal the thefts. The port was burning. Black smoke engulfed Beirut. People were running between the shops, carrying small washing machines or TVs or refrigerators on their backs. They were running into cars and trucks and houses. Running and laughing. I saw those very same scenes just a little while ago, but in Baghdad. War and looting. Running and laughter. Night hollows me out, as does the television. So I escape from the TV to a book. Or I escape to these pages. All of us write here. No, not all of us. But all of us read. That’s what we do after we die. We read and read and read. We never get enough. My grandfather took me to visit his family. His father was illiterate: he never learned to read or write. But when he crossed over to this side he was blessed with the ability to understand the alphabet. Before, he didn’t know how to read his own name, how to read the signs on the stores. All his life he looked with sorrow at the ledger books in his friends’ shops in the old markets of Beirut — a terrible sadness filled his heart because he couldn’t decipher the letters, couldn’t read those words. He died of heart failure. I go and visit him from time to time. Sometimes I go with my grandfather or my father and sometimes I go alone. Or I go with the overseer of the library, or with one of my girlfriends. I see my great-grandfather stretched out in a brown cotton undershirt, his gaunt left breast visible, its skin wrinkled and shrunk from his angina. He reads and drinks water, and reads some more. All of us read here. That’s what we do. I always bring him a few books as a gift.

I did not cross a river. My grandfather carried me. His hair was black. He said he dyed it because his white hair kept reminding him of the other side, and the memories pained him. The longing wore him out. So he dyed his hair and thought he was starting anew. He thought this was another life.

I’ve often written about that time when the moon was in the sky. The swamp was full of broken light, broken like glass. The city’s windows were empty and black, like the windows of the abandoned Al-Murr Tower. I gazed at those windows just as Saman did: they looked like the eyes of a ghoul staring at the city. I’ve often written about the demarcation line and the path I traveled from the museum to Sodeco Square and downtown. The moon was glistening like silver on the empty windows as I walked. The power was out. The city was dark, deserted, as still as dirt: it seemed so distant. I didn’t let the animal with the yellow eyes touch me.

There are seven smaller rats and one big one. The big rat lives in the belly of the mountain. And the seven rats sleep in seven separate lairs near the big rat’s, also in the mountain’s belly. The big rat spends most of its hours asleep. It sleeps for long stretches of time. In 1990, at the end of the war, it went into hibernation. There were fewer dead with the end of the war, so there were fewer souls, and less work to do. It was hungry, and it sunk into a deep sleep to overcome this. Or maybe the hunger made it drowsy, sent it into hibernation. It slept like a bear sleeps through winter. The seven other rats are smaller, but they’re still giants — each one is the size of a mule. There are other smaller rats, and there are ordinary rats as well. But we only see them on rare occasions. They live in the bowels of the earth, and only very rarely come up to the surface.

The mountain had quaked with the recent series of explosions. fourteen explosions? Less? And the big echoing blast: the mountain convulsed, and the big rat was rocked from its slumber. Two thousand pounds of TNT is no small amount of explosives. I saw Saman standing behind the yellow tape with a lot of people, looking over the rifles and shoulders and caps of the soldiers and police, looking at the black chasm in front of the Saint Georges Hotel. I saw the fallen balconies. I saw the shattered glass all over the cars and sidewalk and olive trees. I saw the scorched palms. I saw the scattered body parts. I saw the hose of a fire truck. I saw water gushing like a river from that hose, washing blood and human remains from the sidewalk, dragging them through the iron bars of a sewage drain. I saw a mouse on the street. I saw a cat pick up a white hand from the piles of rubble and glass. The buildings were scorched in black. The glass from the window of the British Bank lay shattered on the ground. The steel and wood scaffolding of the adjacent construction site leaned in the air, but did not fall. I saw crowds of people making their way to the site of the explosion, and I remembered the war. After any explosion or shelling, we’d always go see the destruction. We’d look at the damage and exchange glances of sadness and shock before exchanging any words. Some people were whispering. Some were raising their voices. Their eyes were not eyes. Their voices were not voices. I saw all of that.

The seven smaller rats had woken up as well: the days of industry must be drawing near again. These rats had perished during the war as they ran from one dead person to another. They weren’t evil. These weren’t the rats I used to read about in school. No, we never actually read about any rats, but the teachers used to threaten the troublesome schoolchildren with stories of rats. One of them once said to me: I’ll rub milk and yogurt in your ears and lock you up in the basement with all the rats.

I saw one of my teachers five years ago. She came here after me. I went with the others to welcome her. I went just like that — I didn’t have anything to do, and my eyes were worn out from all the reading, so I said I’d go and observe the rituals, and then I’d write. A writer loves to observe different traditions, different customs.

I went and saw her. She seemed to be limping. Why was she limping? They told me she had fallen in her home and died. What had killed her? They said she had suddenly become ill with cancer. The cancer was in her bones, it hollowed them out. Her femur snapped like a twig and she died. I was filled with sadness as the voices told me what had happened to her. I had always hated her in the land of the living. But when I saw her here, in front of a line of stores decorated for Christmas, I felt such incredible sadness. I was overcome with pity. There was a jug of water in my hand. If I’d had enough strength, I would have rushed over to her and poured her some water, and supported her. But where could I have found such strength? I leaned on an electrical pole and looked at her lame body on the distant sidewalk as she gazed at the clothes in the storefront windows. There were lights everywhere, strings of multicolored lights; real Christmas trees and fake plastic ones; cotton or snow or sprinklings of artificial snow on the branches. Balls of all colors hung from the trees: red and yellow and white and blue. Miniature reindeer; small cardboard caves with nativity scenes beneath the trees; toys and dolls. The street was full of decorations, and the limping woman did not know where she was. She looked confused. Her face had turned pale. I could see a wound on her chest: her blouse was undone, and a white bandage was visible. Why was her blouse undone? It wasn’t a blouse. She emerged from the shadows and stopped beneath a streetlight, and I realized she was wearing a white cotton hospital gown. The immaculate white gown pressed against her flesh — she wasn’t wearing anything underneath. I felt cold just looking at her. The damp wind of the land of the dead felt like ice against my skin, like frozen mud. I could feel her fear. Fear? Or sadness? I wanted to support her, to explain everything, to give her some water. But I didn’t move from my spot. My hand was on the pole, and my head was sweating.

I have so many things to write. I write and write and write. After I’ve read what I’ve written, I request that it be torn up. I always want to tear up these pages. Writing is hard. I don’t know how to write about the things I see. I see things day and night. Every time I leave the house I see people and speak with them. Even when I’m at home or in the library, I see things. I want to write about what I see. They have to be written about. The things themselves don’t care if they’re written down, they’re not interested in that. But I care, and I’m interested. I have to write about what I see. Why do I have to write about these things? Because I can’t sleep if I don’t. I can only sleep once I’ve written something down.

But when I read the page I’ve written, I want to tear it up. Writing is hard. I haven’t written what I wanted to write. There’s a dark chasm between what I’ve seen and what I’ve written: cars disappear in it, and bodies do too. “After the explosion, the security forces cordoned off the scene of the crime,” I read along with Saman. They set up a cordon and blocked off the road and stopped people from entering that street. The people had relatives beneath the rubble, but they weren’t allowed to go in and take their dead. Those who died in Hariri’s motorcade were taken to hospital morgues: to the American University Hospital, and the Hôtel-Dieu Hospital, and the Maqasid Islamic Hospital. But there were other people who just happened to be at the seafront at the time of the explosion, who were walking along the corniche for exercise or leisure, and who were passing by that spot by chance — they were buried beneath the rubble. The security forces had to stop their relatives from coming in and going through the crime scene to dig up the remains. One of the victims had a cell phone. He had tried calling his family. He wasn’t dead yet. He said he was buried under a car. He called and said his leg was stuck beneath the burning car. I read the words with Saman. Did I believe what Saman was reading? Did he believe it?

A day later he was reading other things in the paper. He read that cats were leaving the dark crime scene, which was fenced in with steel barricades painted in black and white. The cats were coming in under the barricades and yellow police tape. The rifles and machine guns could not stop them from coming and going as they pleased. They came in lightly, but left with full bellies. Saman read that the people in Mina al-Hosn and Ain al-Mreisseh could hear the cats fighting and meowing wildly at night. A woman saw a cat outside her kitchen window carrying a human hand in its teeth. The woman was very upset. A family — a woman and her brother and three daughters — fought with the police and managed to get into the off-limits area. A fact-finding commission headed by Peter FitzGerald, an Irish UN delegate, was taking samples from the crime scene just then. Men wearing white masks and white gloves were kneeling in the burnt black earth, between the chunks of asphalt, and taking samples from the soil. At that very moment the family descended on the place. A foot, naked, could be seen sticking out of the debris. The shoe had been burnt off, as had the sock. Were you, weeping woman, really the first to see that foot there? They found a telephone, its batteries dead, in the hand of the man who’d been left behind.

I want to tear up what I’ve written. Why do I write about such horrific things? Saman can read about them in the paper. That same family, the family of the man who was killed because he happened to be passing by that spot at that precise minute at midday on February 14th, that same stricken family had read about it in the papers and seen it all on TV. Should I tear up what I’ve written? I saw them sitting in their tall house, among the furniture bought by the father, sitting in that home that overlooks the Manara corniche; I saw them talking and weeping. I saw the oldest daughter, and the youngest. I saw them and thought of my family. I saw them and did not cry. Why didn’t I cry right then? From the house’s balcony they could see the Ain al-Mreisseh Mosque and the statue of Gamal Abdel Nasser, and the McDonald’s, and the Vendôme Hotel, and the black ghost of the Saint Georges. From there they could see the white ambulances with red crosses or red crescents painted on their doors. From there they could see the red fire trucks and civil defense vans. From there they could see the black debris. And from there they had seen, a little while ago, the fire and smoke. The father had gone out to walk around a bit. He left and did not return.

I want to tear up what I’ve written, but tearing up pages is forbidden: it’s a strict law in the land of the dead. Everything that’s written down is kept in the archives. Tearing up paper is forbidden. After a long time has passed — and if no one asks to see the pages — it’s possible to clean them with a special substance, so that the pages turn white again. But tearing them up is absolutely forbidden. The letters swarm like insects on the page, but it’s forbidden to burn them. I want to burn them. But I can’t.

Saman is up late too. I start to feel tired, so I turn on the TV for a moment and see him on the sofa, still wearing his pants, with his head on the headrest. Why doesn’t he take off his clothes and put on his pajamas? Why doesn’t he relax? A news ticker is on the TV in front of him: The al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigade has taken up. The occupation forces have assassinated. The number of victims of the Pakistan earthquake has risen to 53,000 dead. The American army says that five of its soldiers have. Migrating fowl have spread Avian Bird Flu from Turkey to Syria. The percentage of people who have rejected the constitution in Samarra alone has reached. A mass grave containing victims from the Srebrenica massacre has been discovered in Bosnia. Britain has warned of. Morocco has accused Algeria and the Polisario Front of attempting to. A women’s demonstration in the Belgian capital. Solidarity with. Four Israeli settlers were killed. The al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigade has taken up. And the ticker starts over from the beginning. It’s gone through a full cycle, and Saman is still reading the bylines. Is he even aware he’s reading those words?

The first time they took me to the library I stood between the long rows, among the bookcases and shelves and corridors — I stood there not knowing what to do. How could I read all these books? It’s impossible, I said, I couldn’t read all these books in a hundred years.

You’ve got more than a hundred years, they replied. And it’s not necessary to read all the books. The important thing is that you read.

They took me to the depths of the library. There, in its depths, the old books could be found. There were countless tables, and people spread out among them. The books were open on the tables, beneath green lamps, and men and women were engrossed in reading. Their faces were swimming in other worlds, and sometimes they’d forget to move and their limbs would fall asleep. Once one of them got up to fill his cup at the water cooler and had to brace himself on the tables to keep from falling over: a lovely feeling, as if ants were crawling through his leg, that tingling in the leg and hand from sitting for so long. A woman at another table pushed away her book and got up to walk over to the window, steaming it up with her breath. She looked at the trees and the sky and the clouds. A patch of sea appeared through the trees, a blue patch glistening with sunlight: white dots like silver, yellow dots like gold. I saw tears in her eyes. What was she remembering? What was she thinking at that moment? Her hair was red, her face freckled. She had freckles on her shoulders and back as well. She was wearing a sleeveless blouse. Her shoulders were round. A man at another table lifted his head from a book and looked at her. Her blouse, as white as her skin, had blood-red flowers on it. Her pants were white too. She wasn’t overweight, but that man was looking at her as if she were. As if she were fat. I know how men look at women.

The depths of the library, where the old books are found, are teeming with readers. The dead know their books. But no one here reads any new ones. The overseer of the library, who always helps me find what I’m looking for, says new books are unnecessary. As he drinks some water, he tells me there are two kinds of new books: the first kind are not good; and the second kind are. The second kind are rewritings of old works. The first kind strive to be new, to not imitate the old, and these are generally written by people who don’t like to read — they say they like to read, but in truth they don’t.

“People who like reading don’t write,” states the overseer. “People who like reading don’t waste their time writing. Why should they write? They’ve got all these books to read.”

I look at his young white face — it’s as if this man were just a boy — and tell him I’ve come to love reading since I’ve been here, but that I still love to write anyway.

That’s not the same, he says, for I’m no longer in the land of the living. He’s talking about the new books written over there. He also remarks that I’m still quite argumentative.

“People who like reading don’t waste their time writing or being argumentative — they just sit down and read.”

He takes pleasure in repeating his sentences. Whenever he likes the way words fall on his ears, he repeats them. As if he’s not talking to me. As if he’s talking to himself.

His self-confidence bothers me — his appearance might have something to do with how much he annoys me. If he were an old man, I’d probably accept his words. But he looks like a boy.

Someone might get bored of reading, I tell him, and while he always says the good books are the old ones, not all the old ones are good, which means that there aren’t all that many good books and it’s possible for someone to read all of them. After that, what would that person do? After he finished reading everything, couldn’t he start writing? He’s finished all the good books, I say, so what should he do next?

“He should read them all over again,” he replies. “The first reading doesn’t count. It’s the second reading that’s really the first. On the second go, you start to understand what you’re reading. From that point onward, in the subsequent readings that come year after year, decade after decade, you begin to really see what you’re reading. At first you see only words. The images come with time. That book I gave you two months ago: you’ll go back to it in two years, and you won’t believe you’ve ever seen it before.”

Johannes’s words annoy me, and don’t. I look at the sinews of his neck while he’s speaking, and I gradually relax. I know he’s not a liar. His words are sound. There’s a certain passion to them. He doesn’t speak much. He doesn’t like talking. They say he used to write as well. Not here, but in the land of the living. He doesn’t write here. There’s not a single page in his box in the archive. Each of us has our own box in the archive. Everything I write but don’t want to keep is taken over there. What I want to keep is left with me. It’s left with me for a fixed period of time, then it too is taken over there. My box is almost full. I’ll be given another one. The overseer’s box is empty. There are only a few empty boxes in the archive. All of us write. Writing’s like the plague. Except none of the elderly write. And there are a few younger people who don’t write either.

I want to read everything Johannes has read, but that will take a long time. I don’t know when he came here, but I know it was a long time ago. How did he die? I don’t know. There are no visible marks on his body. Maybe he died in his sleep, although he looks like he’s just 20 or 30 years old. I don’t know how long a life he had — his childlike face deceives the eye. Maybe he died when he was 40.

I watch Saman watching TV. Why doesn’t he get up and walk to the balcony and look at the moon? The moon is almost full, almost complete, in the Beirut sky. It’s Saturday night, and tomorrow will be Sunday. Rain will fall on the city tomorrow afternoon. And after the rain the sky will clear and the moon will come out. At three in the morning a mountain of white clouds will appear in the sky of Beirut. No, not a mountain — a whole range of mountains. The white clouds will flow in as the moon rises above them. But no one looks at the moon. The people are asleep. The city’s asleep. They stay up late in restaurants and nightclubs, in their streets and their homes. They stay up until they grow tired, then hurl themselves into their beds. After all the eating and drinking and smoking, they sink into deep sleep. I can only see one solitary woman out on a balcony — the moon woke her up. Her hand is on her stomach as she looks at the full moon. She’s wearing a blue nightgown. Women know the moon better than men do: the moon acts on their bodies. Energy flows through the woman’s belly as she looks at the moon and hears a man in one of the houses coughing in his sleep. Some windows are open, even though it rained earlier that evening. The weather is refreshing, but not cold. She hears a bed creak, and a dog bark.

But it’s still Saturday. We haven’t reached Sunday yet. I look at Saman in front of the TV and think: Doesn’t that man ever read? When he does read, it’s only ever the paper, or the subtitles on the TV screen. Why doesn’t he really read? My sister Mary used to shove books in front of his face in our school days and say, Read this, this is good, it’s got a great story and some great pictures too. But he doesn’t read. He says he gets drowsy and falls asleep whenever he opens up a book.

He thought he wanted to read something as he was leaving that woman’s house in the neighborhood overlooking the landfill they call “Mount Burj Hammoud.” He was tired; his chest felt jagged from the lack of sleep; and his head was pounding from the heat and humidity. He thought he wanted to read something right then. The thought was out of character, so unlikely that he asked himself — as he was getting in his car bathed in the streetlamps’ orange light — where the feeling had come from: “I want to read a book?” It was such a foreign notion that he could feel himself splitting from his body. Had I, with my mental prodding in the sleeping city’s darkness, planted that idea from over here, from the other side?

I did not cross a river. I went down toward the sea along the demarcation line. The moonlight poured out like molten silver; it shone, as dense as mercury, on the buildings’ windows. Moonlight is delicate: trees float through it, as do the buildings and houses. But that night the moonlight was thicker than the rays of sun in the height of summer. That wasn’t a moon. I had left the land of the living.

I feel relaxed here when I read. We don’t feel fear here. I talk to a lot of people when I’m not reading. We talk and eat together. I know what they think. They’re not afraid. In the land of the living, fear drives you on from one hour to the next. We’re not afraid here. We do feel thirsty — we need water. But we don’t get hungry very often. If I’m engrossed in a book, several days might go by without my noticing that I haven’t put a bite in my mouth. That doesn’t always happen. But it does happen. We don’t get hungry very often, but the thirst. Wherever you go — out on the streets, in the library, in people’s homes, even out in the fields — you find water coolers, and small streams and springs and pools as well. Life here is impossible without water. You only feel truly at ease when you are drinking. Always this need, this desire: for water.

I drink and read. I’m not afraid here. I feel no pain. When the first blow landed on my head — as I was being kidnapped by the museum — my head starting ringing loudly, as if it were a church bell. I heard the clanging from one ear to the other. And I heard the echo swell and pulse painfully against my eyes. I knew I was being kidnapped. I knew it. But I didn’t lose hope. There were people who were kidnapped and came back. Not many, but it had happened before. And I knew the Lord would not abandon me. No, I didn’t think about the Lord. I thought about life. Life wouldn’t abandon me now. Life wouldn’t give up on me — I was still at its beginning. Where did that great hope that filled my heart come from? Yes, of course I was terrified. But with fear came hope. I’m trying to understand the secret of that hope. I read and drink water; I write and try to understand. To this very moment, I still haven’t grasped my own death. I haven’t comprehended it yet. How did I die? Why did I die? My time had not yet come, so how had I left the land of the living? How had I left it?

I cannot sleep. My fingers grow weary as I write. I set aside the pages and go to the window. I was given this room in one of the wings of the library after I started working here. I love this side of the library. This world — which has become my own — is an endless library. Is this my world? I’m still split between two worlds. I haven’t forgotten the other side yet. I cannot forget it.

I look out the window and see clouds swimming in the night sky, and I think of Saman opening a window and looking at the black ghost of the Burj Hammoud Landfill. If Saman got up from the sofa right now and went onto the balcony that overlooks the church behind the house (you can’t see the actual church from the balcony, but you can see the top of the black tower and — in the tower’s heart — the copper bell), if he went out onto the balcony and looked at the sky, what would he see, and what would he think? He’s not a boy anymore. He’s 40 now.

I have a closet. And on the inside of the closet door there’s a mirror. The closet is full of books. I don’t own any dresses or purses or high heels here. At night I look in the mirror and imagine myself in the land of the living. All these years have gone by and I’m still as I was — I haven’t changed. The black bruise on my cheek is the same. My gray wool skirt with the blue polka dots is the same. My short undershirt is the same. I touch my stomach. I feel the bones of one hand, then those of the other. I touch the blue bruise on my inner thigh. I touch my eyes. I comb my hair and think of life.

We’ve heard that the latest blasts woke up the giant rat. Two thousand pounds of explosive material in the middle of Beirut. The entire city shook. Saman loved the man they killed. That man restored the city. He restored the buildings Saman loves. My grandfather’s name is also Saman. When my father, like his father before him, named his only son Saman (he knew he wouldn’t have another son, he knew it, and so did my mother), my grandfather Saman said the boy would grow up to become an architect, just like his grandfather. My brother Saman looks at the Mexico Villa, he looks at the three identical buildings on Maarad Street, he looks at the arches of our house, and he asks himself what he’s done with his life. He feels the burden of time on his shoulders. As if, this past year, he’d lived forty years in a single stroke.

I want to talk to him. I miss him. I used to love talking to him. I remember how we used to sit together at the university cafeteria eating a hamburger and drinking and smoking. I remember sitting together on the balcony of our house. I remember the walks we used to take on the street by our grandfather’s house on the mountain. I remember the sea and sun and sand. I remember the bronzing oil. I remember all those things. And I remember his laugh. He used to follow me from room to room when he was a child.

The giant rat has woken from its long slumber. It had slept for fifteen years: the years of civil peace brought it sleep. Hunger, and then sleep. There were fewer dead, and so it slept. Now it’s awake. The rat is hungry, and angry. Angry because it’s hungry. Hungry because it’s angry. Why did that blast wake it up? Its offspring — the seven smaller rats — are all on edge. Where’s the food? Where are the souls? The blood? Where are the lives to be eaten? They’re waiting for what will come. One of the rats lost its way in the maze of tunnels and crossed over to the other side. Did it cross the river mentioned in the Odyssey, the river that separates the two worlds? Dante, for his part, never mentioned a rat that devours souls. When I read his book, I felt as if the person who wrote it was someone from this world, not from the land of the living. But Johannes said no, he was among the living when he wrote it. I speak with Johannes sometimes, but he generally prefers silence. He asks me to read the book again. I ask him whether Dante had read Homer. I tell him I’d read somewhere that Dante didn’t know Greek, is that true?

These things aren’t important now, he says.

I ask him when they’ll be important.

He tells me he’s reading right now, and asks me why I don’t go and read as well.

I tell him he’s read that book a thousand times since I’ve been here, and no one knows how many times before I came.

He looks up and smiles. I know he loves me. Even when he raises his voice — which is permitted here — even then I know he loves me. He doesn’t scare me. But I don’t like it when he gets annoyed at me. I want to know things about his life, but he never says anything.

A rat lost its way and crossed over from this side to the other. It stirred up horror among the homes of Beirut. That wasn’t the big rat. The big rat is the size of a mountain. If it left this world and went to the land of the living, it would topple Beirut like an earthquake. I watch Saman watching TV and feel drowsy — that’s the benefit of TV for me. As I watch the land of the living, as I watch images from that world go by one after the other on the small screen, I feel myself doze off, as if I were turning into a tree.

I start nodding off in front of the screen, and I fall asleep. The blue light fills my eyes. I notice myself nodding off before I sink fully into sleep. It’s as if I can no longer feel my fingers, as if they were soil. I’m no longer Josephine Yarid — I’ve turned into earth. I gradually fall asleep, sinking into the sofa, sinking into the soil. Now no longing would reach me, no desires would torment me. I’m soil. I’m asleep. I’m.

At six in the morning the alarm clock goes off. I’ve got to shower and drink some water before going to work. My work’s not far. It’s here, in the library. The sounds of the city waking up enter from the outside, from beyond the window. Streets. Doors. Windows. The smell of coffee. Of milk. Of tea. Voices.

The smells aren’t strong — they’re memories of smells. But I can still smell them. Johannes says that that’s because of the strength of the longing within me, and looks sad.

~ ~ ~

“Beirut, Tuesday, October 18th: Lebanese young and old are eagerly awaiting the publication of the final special report into the murder of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri. The German public prosecutor Detlev Mehlis has been busy preparing the report, and the people have been asking themselves whether or not it will reveal the whole truth.

“‘I’m both eager and anxious,’ said Ghada Sinu, a housewife. ‘Every day I get up and buy the paper to find out when the German wolf (Mehlis) will catch his prey and throw the people who plotted Hariri’s murder into jail.’

“Across Beirut, Mehlis has become the talk of the town, even in schoolyards, where children as young as eight are talking about the German prosecutor who was entrusted three months ago with leading the UN-appointed commission to investigate Hariri’s assassination on February 14th. ‘I overheard one of my pupils ask his friend if he’d heard that Mehlis was submitting his report on Thursday. He said that’s when we’ll know who killed Hariri,’ Rhonda Hakim, a schoolteacher, was quoted as saying to a German news agency. And Rhonda added: ‘I asked each of my students to mention the name of a famous person in Lebanon, and one of them said Mehlis, and called him the German version of Columbo, the American TV detective.’ She also said some parents had informed her that their children might not come in to school on Friday, for fear of violence following the publication of the report.

“People in the streets are talking about the Mehlis Report. Anyone walking down Beirut’s famous Hamra Street these days will immediately notice the crowds sitting in the cafés, reading the newspapers and talking about the investigation into Hariri’s assassination.

“Ahmad Hijazi, a businessman, said he had come to this restaurant (Wimpy’s) to read the paper and try to guess what Mehlis would say in his report, and figure out if Mehlis knew the full truth, or if the report would be more general. And Salim al-Halw, a bank employee, said he’s hoping for the best, especially since Germans are famous for their precision.

“Abu Jalal Dakroub, a well-known newspaper vendor on that street, said he was sold out in less than an hour that morning, something that had never before happened in his lifetime — not once in the 47 years he’s been selling newspapers.

“And Youssef Khawand, an employee at Starbucks (on Hamra Street) who was wiping the morning’s rainwater from the tables, said: ‘The newspapers are getting torn up from being passed around so much from table to table. The customers keep asking for the papers and fighting over them.’ A small increase in security forces and military personnel has been observed near various intersections and embassies, and in front of commercial centers.

“Some schools are planning to close on Thursday and Friday as a precautionary measure. Meanwhile, fearing assassination attempts, a number of Ministers and MPs are prolonging their stays abroad, and the Druze opposition leader Walid Jumblatt has taken refuge in the fortified Mukhtara Palace on top of Mount Lebanon. Samir Geagea — the Christian opposition leader who was finally released from the Defense Ministry prison where he spent the past eleven years of his life in a tiny underground cell — is currently staying in a hotel in Paris, surrounded by a heavy security detail.

“And Saad Hariri, Rafik Hariri’s son, the head of the largest parliamentary bloc since the assassination, continues to move from one major world capital to another as he awaits the publication of the Mehlis Report. The absence of all of these figures of Lebanon has added to the citizens’ apprehensions.

“But the bustle of construction sites downtown will certainly catch the eye of any foreigner passing through Beirut these days, especially in the part of the city stretching from Rue Weygand and Allenby Street toward the Phoenicia and Saint Georges hotels: this forms the western section of Solidere’s project to rebuild downtown Beirut, which was destroyed by the war. Massive yellow cranes cover the sky here, and tourists are amazed at how much construction has been carried out over the past few months despite the explosions and the prevailing state of anxiety and fear. This construction activity is linked to the recent rise in oil prices and new investments from the Persian Gulf in downtown Beirut.

“Yukio Yomiuri, a businessman from Tokyo visiting Beirut for the first time, said he went up in the tethered Sky Gate hot air balloon and was surprised by the number of high-rises currently sprouting up all along the shoreline, from the commercial heart of downtown to the Ain al-Mreisseh district. Anyone passing through that part of town can count dozens of massive construction sites, and can envision the area’s transformation in the coming months by looking at the large illustrations hanging around the construction sites. Those illustrations also bear the new buildings’ names: Platinum Tower, Beirut Tower, Marina Tower, Two Park Avenue, 1330 Park Avenue, The Four Seasons, the Beirut Hilton. These giant buildings and five-star hotels are all part of Rafik Hariri’s dream to transform the city into the business capital of the Middle East in the next few years. One end of those seafront projects is located across from the Normandy Landfill, which, since 1999, has been undergoing clean-up treatments with the aim of turning it into a public park. Solidere has taken over the project, which was supposed to have been completed by October 2003, according to the steel placard hanging at the entrance to the landfill.

“Jack Matta, an engineer for the seafront towers, assured us that the projects have not been delayed, and that the years 2006 and 2007 would mark Beirut’s renaissance, with the completion of the new yacht harbor finally opening the Mediterranean city onto the sea and the world.

“The engineer Walid Ghulam said that thousands of people have been working around the clock for months to complete all tasks on time. And truckloads of workers with helmets can in fact be seen fastening together iron bars, operating cement mixers, and mounting panes of glass. The high-rises will combine apartments, offices, and restaurants.

“Even as red curtains flutter from the rows of wrecked windows at the Saint Georges Hotel where the explosion that killed Hariri took place, cloth ribbons dance on the new titanium bars holding panes of glass in place at the Marina Tower; and as this opulent blue-glass building rises up above the pink Monroe Hotel and the sea beyond it, trucks loaded with yellow sand continue to flow in to fill up the massive hole caused by the February 14th explosion.

“Meanwhile the Netzeitung website, citing sources close to the international investigation commission, has related important details about the last minutes of former Prime Minister Hariri’s life:

“On Monday, February 14th at midday — a day with calm seas and clear winter skies — at precisely ten minutes to one o’clock (12:50 pm), the former Prime Minister left the Étoile restaurant across from the Parliament Building and gave the head of his motorcade directions: they were to take Hussein al-Ahdab Street, then cut across Rue Weygand to Foch Street, and take that to the corniche.

“Hariri drove his armored car himself, accompanied by Basil Fuleihan, a Member of Parliament. The car was custom-made and could not be damaged by RPG-7 anti-tank grenade launchers. According to international experts from Mehlis’s team, Hariri’s car rarely had any mechanical problems.

“The second, fourth, and fifth cars were all black Mercedes with three bodyguards in each one, and the cars were equipped with state-of-the-art devices that could cut off all radio and cell phone transmissions in the immediate vicinity of the moving motorcade (a system that cost over 300,000 dollars).

“The last of the six vehicles in the motorcade was an ambulance — the former Prime Minister always wanted doctors present in case they were needed.

“At 12:56 Hariri’s motorcade passed by the Monroe Hotel and through the Mina al-Hosn district, picking up speed as it approached the Saint Georges Hotel, the best spot to carry out the assassination.

“Less than thirty seconds later, the explosion occurred, shaking the city. The doctors ascertained that Rafik Hariri’s death resulted from massive brain damage.

“Six and a half minutes from Parliament Square to the site of the explosion. Those minutes are currently running through the mind of the international prosecutor Detlev Mehlis, who is also focusing on calls made on six cell phones in the above-mentioned area shortly before the explosion — cell phones that were all turned off and thrown away after the explosion. In those six and a half minutes, as the motorcade was passing between the construction sites, the crime was carried out.”

~ ~ ~

From Sunday, October 16th, to Wednesday, October 19th, Saman and Cecilia meet up early each evening and stay together until after midnight. Things have calmed down a bit at Monoprix, and Cecilia has been heading to work early and leaving between six and seven in the evening, as the sky is darkening and the streetlamps begin to light up Beirut. On Sunday night they cook green beans with olive oil. Saman sauteés some chopped onions and garlic in a saucepan. She chops a tomato on a wood cutting board. The smell of frying fills the kitchen. Cecilia laughs and says: I spend all day cooking only to come home and start cooking again. And we only eat half of what we make. Less than half. Today I cooked mujaddara, and made stuffed grape leaves and trays of baked kibbeh. And now we’re cooking green beans with olive oil.

Saman says he didn’t know they tore down the building across from the Aoun Supermarket. When did they tear it down?

Just two or three days ago, Cecilia says.

Saman says that when he passed in front of the Wakeem restaurant, the old women weren’t playing Scrabble inside like they usually do. They were all sitting at tables outside instead, with the letters in front of them; and beside the game they had small ceramic plates filled with brown cookies.

Cecilia says the whole city is acting differently these days.

Saman says there’s more space there now that they’ve removed the building and the big tree.

I don’t remember a tree, Cecilia replies.

I’m not talking about the building across from the Aoun, Saman says, I’m talking about the other one, across from the Wakeem, by the garbage bins. Don’t you remember the giant tree that covered the sidewalk and street?

Watch the onions, Cecilia replies. We don’t want them browned.

She stirs the beans into the saucepan and sprinkles a spoonful of salt on them. Now we have to fry up the beans, she says. Then add the tomatoes and a spoon of tomato paste and leave it on the burner to cook. Isn’t this dish easy?

That’s it? Saman asks. We’re done?

We’re done, says Cecilia. The stove will do the rest.

The place is warm. The overhead light reflects off the kitchen sink, and the sound of the television comes in from the living room. An uncorked bottle of white wine is on the table, as are two glasses and a plate of white cheese. Cecilia puts a cover on the saucepan and turns down the flame a bit. Saman pours some more wine into the glasses. The wind suddenly blows in through the window, and rain starts to fall.

The rain pours onto the city. The power goes out with the first few drops. Children start shouting — they rush out to the balconies, clapping and screaming for more rain. Cars honk their horns. In just a few moments, the streets become rivers. The gas flame beneath the saucepan lights the kitchen with a dim blue glow. The two of them are seated beside one another. Cecilia laughs, delighted by the rain. This is the first rainfall. The smell of cement fills the air, and the smell of earth. The city is washing the summer and all the summer’s dust from its body. The air is being washed clean. The power has gone out, but that’s normal for this city. It will come back on in a little while. There are no planes bombing us these days, and the port is full of ships bearing fuel. A little while later, the generators start up again and the power comes back on. The music of the rain among Beirut’s buildings, the cries of exuberant children: the sounds of a city changing, being purified.

They embrace, then head toward the balcony, moving slowly. They don’t step outside. They open the balcony door and stand there, on the threshold separating the inside world from the one outside. The raindrops fall in at an angle, shimmering silver: the balcony tiles are all wet. The rain comes down like needles, like needles and thread, starting and stopping. Across the way, the mall’s reserve generators have started up, and the mall lights have come on. But the streetlights — the municipality lights — remain dark. Darkness, then light. Light that comes and casts itself onto the rain and the darkness. The raindrops glisten. The light reflects off them into countless luminescent beads, as if the sky were shedding both water and sparks. The music of water and electricity lights up the air. And light from the mall reflects off the dark buildings, off their windows, off the glad and hopeful faces staring in wonder at the rain from behind glass.

The beans aren’t for tonight. Once they’ve cooled off, they put them in the fridge for tomorrow. They sprinkle some golden olive oil on them and leave them for tomorrow. Cecilia loves the colors of that dish. Red tomatoes with green beans and white onions and garlic, and then the golden drops of oil. Green beans and olive oil only taste good the next day, and only if they’re served cold. A night in the fridge lets out the flavor, and the different tastes blend together. Saman loves eating that dish with raw onions. Cecilia prefers cucumbers.

Tonight they drink some wine and have a light meal of cheese and sandwiches. Cecilia says she’s gained weight the past few days. Saman says knowledge is no good for the stomach — he’s been growing a potbelly ever since he started learning to cook. Cecilia laughs because you can still see his ribs poking out. He swims for an hour or two every single day. And she doesn’t know how many hours he spends walking around.

In bed, she asks him whether he’s made an appointment for his annual physical. He laughs as he moves her hair from her face, and asks why she’s thinking about the heart right then. She pulls her hair together behind her head, and, just as she’s securing it with her white hair tie, the electricity comes back on throughout the house. The blinding light catches her off guard.

The wine is making him drowsy, as is the bed. He falls asleep for a half hour. While he’s sleeping, she covers herself with a blanket and goes out onto the balcony. The rain has stopped. She lifts her head, and the scene takes her breath away: flowing milky clouds climbing the pure night sky; and a full white moon rising above the clouds, lighting up their edges, lighting up the sky. The clouds look like mountains. At their summits the sky is clear, utterly sheer and diaphanous. The moon looks down at Cecilia standing on the balcony. Her hand is on her stomach and her bare shoulder glistens in the light. Cecilia stays like that: she’s praying.

~ ~ ~

The land of the dead is divided into seven regions. And each region is itself divided into seven other regions, and in this way.

I don’t know those regions. And I have no real desire to travel to them and discover their cities and villages, their mountains and rivers and plains. First of all, traveling’s not easy. And second, reading is more enjoyable. The journey from the bookshelf containing the volumes that start with the letter “A” to the bookshelf containing the volumes that start with “B” takes years and years, and you can discover endless regions from one volume to the next. That’s what we do here. If you disregard our longing for the land of the living, our deepest desire is to read. Those who’ve been here a long time even stop writing eventually. They write a lot at first, then they stop. Anyone who keeps writing is considered strange. Those “strangers” — most of them — were not touched by the yellow-eyed animal when they first arrived in the land of the dead. Longing reaches its peak in them.

What I know about these things I know from the following: (1) from personal experience; (2) from reading; (3) from Johannes, when he actually speaks. Johannes only rarely speaks, but when he does the words flow out of him rapidly. I learn more from a half-hour with him than I could learn from talking to the others for years.

No censuses have ever been carried out in this world, but there’s little doubt that the number of residents is huge. There are regions in which the dead are so densely populated that you cannot breathe: the air becomes thin above the people’s heads, and you have to gasp just to get some air. The living know this feeling too. For example, when you’re standing in a crowd of thousands at a demonstration in a packed square. Or if the power goes out and you get stuck in an elevator. But on the other hand, there are also cold and distant regions where just a few people settle. They cut holes in the surface of the ice to fish. They pass all of winter in their igloos, never coming out. The storms raging outside don’t bother them, nor do the snowfalls that blanket the vast white fields. They keep small fires going inside, and they have books. Each reader sinks into his book and forgets where he is.

Johannes once traveled to those regions. He doesn’t talk about them much. But when he does mention them, you can tell he knows those places with all five of his senses, and not merely with the knowledge of books. But I might be imagining this. There have been other times when taking his words too literally has led to misunderstandings.

Although we spend a lot of time in the same place, I don’t know much about his life. He doesn’t talk about his family. I only know that his grandfather used to own the Clemenceau Forest (by the American University), and that he sold that small forest to the French Embassy; then he built a house with arches, a three-story house on the hill overlooking the Wadi Abu Jamil district. When the grandfather died his son — Johannes’s father — finished the project. He put a tiled roof on the house. And he brought in the master craftsman Niman Louwendes, who made ornate shutters for the windows, the likes of which even Beirut’s palaces had never seen before. He put tiled awnings above the small upper windows. The house’s windows were made of stained glass: circles, triangles, squares; red, blue, green. As Johannes was telling me about the family house, I thought he must be saying those things because he’d read what I’d written. Johannes always reads my papers before putting them in the archive. When he finished describing his house I told him that I too — as I had written — had lived my entire life in an old house with tall ceilings and round stained-glass windows.

Johannes nodded his head and said nothing.

While I was alive, I never imagined I’d one day find myself in this world. I always thought a person’s life ended when they gave up the ghost. You breathe your last breath, and you die. If you’re Christian they wash your body with a sponge and soap and water and dress you in a clean robe that smells like detergent and put you in a coffin. If you’re Muslim they wash you with a sponge and soap and water and wrap you in a clean shroud and. I never thought about these things much, but I always knew them. I died long before I was old enough for my hair to turn white. I never saw wrinkles spread across my face; and death never preoccupied me, even though I did think about it. I thought about it because of the war, and because of my grandfather. He died picking mulberries from our tree. A tree of white mulberries: our relative Baseel Yarid always used to say that those were the sweetest white mulberries in the world. He told us he once saw a bonsai mulberry in a Buddhist temple in Kyoto, Japan. The tree was a hundred years old and the size of a small child. Its sumptuous wood was soft and glistening, like polished ivory. Its leaves were a bit smaller than the leaves of our mulberry, and every year at the end of summer a handful of honeyed white fruit would appear among its leaves. The monks believed those few fruits came from Buddha. A single fruit would fill your belly with delight for a whole year.

My grandfather used to pick mulberries every morning during the summer. He’d drink a cup of bitter coffee and then head to the mulberry tree. The mulberry was in one corner of the garden, and the palm tree in the other. The dates of the palm were a brilliant red color in autumn. But he didn’t like dates as much as he liked mulberries. I was asleep. My grandfather had gotten up early that day, and my brother Saman was picking mulberries with him. My grandfather died gathering the white fruit that had fallen from the tree. I didn’t see him die. But Saman did.

One of our maids woke me: “Your grandfather’s dead! Get up, get up!”

I saw dead people and funerals during the war as well. I always thought death was the end of it. We went to church. We went to Mass on Sundays. My mother would light some candles, and so would Mary, and Emily, and if they asked me to I lit some as well. But I never thought about church or eternal life. I told myself I was still young, still at the start of everything. One day I’d become an old woman and wear a big red wool sweater and carry a red parasol — and on that day I’d think about such things. Or maybe I wouldn’t think about them even then. Why should I? You die, and your life is over. You’ve got long years to live before that happens, and in those years you should try to learn to be happy. That’s what I used to think. Was I wrong?

Tables fill the writing hall. Rows and rows of them. And on each table there’s a bundle of paper and some blue Bic pens. We sit and write. In the beginning — when I first arrived here — they informed me I was to write my entire life on a single page. That was what was required of me. I had all these pages on which to write, and I was to keep on trying, time after time. The drafts were to be put in the desk drawer. And I was to put the final clean copy on the desk and leave the Bic pen on top of it. It was difficult. I was used to fountain pens, and had never liked ballpoints. And then how could someone — even if they’d lived a life as short as mine — possibly write their entire life on a single page? What should I write, and what should I leave out? What things were important (family, friends, places), and what weren’t (food, movies, clothes)? How could I know what they were looking for? Where should I begin? Should I start with the year of my birth, and then move forward word by word, starting a new line each time I reach the end of one, until I finally reach the last corner of the page and write about the year of my death? Is that what was required? And if I did know the very first word (the year of my birth) and the very last word (the year of my death), did I know the many (the few) words between the two numbers, between the corner where life begins and the corner where life ends? But how could I know what to write and what to leave out?

Before I began, I thought a single page couldn’t possibly be enough. Then I started. And when I started, I ran into an unexpected difficulty: Which words should I use? Words wouldn’t say what I wanted to say. Days went by, then weeks, and months, and I started writing more and more. And I discovered one page wasn’t enough. I wrote and wrote and wrote. A single day of my life would fill a whole ream of paper. What should I do? How could I get rid of things? What should I leave out?

That lasted a long time, and then I began to cross things out. And I kept crossing things out until I had crossed out everything on all the pages. Now what? I had to start over. Slowly. This time I wrote half a page and then stopped. I stopped like someone who’d been rushing across the world. I was exhausted, I was panting and sweating, even though I’d only written a half page. I wanted water. My tongue was parched, and so was my throat. Where was the water? My cup was empty. Where was the woman who brings us water? I was so thirsty. The words moved like insects on the page. This was my whole life — half a page. And this intense thirst, as if I’d been eating sand while writing. I’d only written half a page, a handful of words, so why was I so thirsty, and why were my eyes burning? The woman came by in her blue gown. She filled my cup with water. I looked at the red dot on her nose and wanted to cry. I set the pen down on the page and wept. Did I weep? None of them saw me. Were they crying as well, each of them at their own table behind a white page, or a page covered in black?

People don’t cry here. I’ve only rarely seen someone cry. In other regions there’s wailing and the gnashing of teeth. The Province of Killers is extremely hot. When you enter that region, all the water flows out of your body and your limbs dry up. You could lose your arm while walking — just from the desiccation and the scorching sand. The water there is awful: red, stagnant, and rank. Small pools of it sometimes boil over. The killers drink only that water. That’s their eternal punishment. Drinking blood. Sweat pours out of them incessantly. There are towels on the shelves, and when they wipe off their chests, the towels turn blood-red. They drink from the boiling pools, and weep. They weep incessantly. Their fingers are blue: they’re constantly biting at them, as if they were sharpening pencils. They never eat anything. There’s no food in the Province of Killers. Only the awful red water.

If they stop drinking from the pools, thirst ravages them. When a body is that thirsty, it starts sucking water out of its eyes. The fluid in the eyeballs dries up, and you feel thorns being pushed into your sockets. That’s from the dehydration. Then you run to a pool of blood and dive in. The boiling blood doesn’t kill you. You weep and scream, and weep some more. Naked. Their clothes have been taken away from them. They live like beasts, like cattle. Worse. A lot worse. Cattle have good lives. They graze on the green grass; they drink sweet clean water; and if they were to look at the scenery, they’d see trees and mountains and villages. Cattle live good lives. The dwellers in the Province of Killers only ever see — night and day — pools filled with blood. They live in huts made of bones, on patches of dirt between the pools. The bones are old and foul-smelling. They sleep in those huts for an hour or less, until they’re woken by their thirst. And they jump into the pools once more.

We don’t know that region. It’s the law: no one here ever goes over there. It’s forbidden for a normal person to see such things. We know of them, but we’ve never seen them. We can even forget them if we want. But I — because I write — don’t want to forget. It’s important to keep everything in my head.

There are books here I cannot understand. They have strange illustrations, and are written in some foreign tongue. The illustrations combine human forms with those of plants. And the letters of that language look like rings and forceps and nails. No one can read those books.

~ ~ ~

Saman Yarid died on the evening of October 20, 2005. He was walking back from the Phoenicia Hotel after a two-hour swim. He did not reach his house on Ghandour al-Saad Street. As he passed by the Balthus restaurant, he felt — without any warning — a horrific pain in his chest. He stumbled, and fell on his face.

Where exactly is the Balthus located? And what would that change? The restaurant is located in commercial downtown Beirut, on the route from Parliament Square to the Phoenicia Hotel. It’s part of a commercial and residential complex still under construction: 1330 Park Avenue. Just a little distance away, another complex is rising up: Two Park Avenue. Avenue Plaza, a stately brown building, is right beside it, as are other buildings ringed with gardens. The buildings have not been finished yet, and the gardens are not yet visible; but the construction sites are busy day and night. Wooden boards surround the sites. There are illustrations on those boards, colored illustrations of the projects underway. There’s “Berytus Parks” at the intersection of Ahmad Shawqi Road and Park Avenue: buildings of concrete and glass. From the roof of the complex — if they ever finish it — you’ll be able to see this whole section of Solidere’s reconstruction project: the sea and all the seafront towers (the Hilton, The Four Seasons, Marina Tower, Platinum Tower, Beirut Tower). You’ll see the Phoenicia Hotel (pink, like the Monroe); and the Holiday Inn, which is still deserted, its windows black, its walls riddled with bullet-holes, half of it covered with a huge and brightly colored advertisement for a new residential development on Mount Lebanon (Abadiyya Hills: luxurious villas, gardens, swimming pools); and above the Holiday Inn, the Al-Murr Tower. No one fires shots from one tower to another now. The place is calm. You can see the alleys of Wadi Abu Jamil, you can see the tiled roofs, the villas beneath the Government Palace, the Palace’s tiles, and the dome of the Armenian church towering behind it — the church is dark black. You can also see the minarets of the Mohammad al-Amin Mosque: you can’t see its blue domes from here, but you can see its minarets and the gold glistening on their tips.

When will they finish the Bank of Kuwait and the Arab World at the intersection of Foch and Weygand? The building permit says it will be done in 2008. There’s another construction site where Foch and Al-Mina come together: the Foch Residence Building. Wooden boards fence in a deep pit. Bulldozers are hard at work. The smell of mud and stone: the laying of the foundation has begun. The steel bars. The pouring of cement. A steel plate proclaims the work will be completed in May 2007.

Saman Yarid will not see these towers. The noise doesn’t let up all day. The whole place, from Foch Street to the Saint Georges Hotel, is one big construction site. Noise and dust and movement. The cranes’ yellow steel arms cover the sky. But the sun has set. The blue of daylight turns to orange, then dark gray, then black. Night falls on Beirut. The construction lets up, and dies away. The place is empty. People are in their homes now. The streets are still.

A man lies on the ground between the Balthus restaurant and Berytus Parks, and breathes his last. A car goes by, but the bright yellow headlights don’t light up the other side of the road. This restaurant is famous for its fish soup — its sumptuous Friday meal. A single bowl costs fifty dollars, but it’s the best fish in the city. The restaurant only serves that soup on Fridays. On Tuesdays they serve prawns with rice. On Mondays they cook up chicken with thyme. And on Fridays: fish soup.

It’s not Friday yet. Tomorrow’s Friday. Tomorrow’s the Mehlis Report. It’s still Thursday evening. The streets of Beirut are unusually empty. There are soldiers and policemen and military vehicles at every intersection. The people of Beirut are waiting for the report. This evening, or sometime during the night, or tomorrow at dawn, the Mehlis Report will be released. The German prosecutor delivered it to Kofi Annan two hours ago.

It’s not Friday morning yet. On Friday morning, at dawn, the report will be released to the satellite news stations. There will be a four-hour simultaneous translation of the entire report from English into Arabic on Al-Jazeera. The city’s houses will be lit up in blue, the blue of television screens. The TVs will flicker behind the windows and curtains. The streets will still be sunk in darkness. Everyone will hold their breath. Faces half asleep. And faces fully awake. Watching and listening to the translation. The bodies all electric. The report finally here. Now we’ll know what we wanted to know. What will we know?

It’s not Friday morning yet. A damp salty breeze rustles through the row of palm trees. The body stretched out on the sidewalk by the Balthus has stopped moving.

~ ~ ~

I don’t see my family very much. I go and visit them from time to time, but not too often. I don’t know how to act around them: my mother and father, my grandparents. They sit on the sofa beneath the oak tree, or on the balcony. They drink water in silence, each reading a book. And whenever they look up at me, I’m at a loss as to what to do. I don’t visit them much.

I read, and write, and work in the library. I don’t even turn on the TV all that often. I have yet to be cured of my longing for the land of the living, but the TV doesn’t give me what I need. I read and lose myself between the two shores of a book. I lose myself as I gaze at the fields, and then at the city. I walk down a long road lit up by streetlights, their gold flowing forth. The humidity creates shining planets around those lights. I hear music, and voices. I can smell the fried potatoes, the eggplant, the cauliflower. I read and lose myself in the world I left.

Here I am in his room. I haven’t forgotten it. The old curtains, the sun shining behind them. The big wooden bed. The dresser with a radio and cassette tapes on top of it. The green glass ashtray. Was it green or blue? How could I have forgotten? The memories are escaping. They slip like sand between your fingers. I’ve forgotten the color of the ashtray. But I still remember the stains on the ceiling, and how the paint seemed to ripple like the surface of the sea. And I remember the smell of his hands. His long fingernails. How he used to stand in front of the gas stove silently making tea. The sun shining through the cloth of the curtains. The sounds from the street. A car horn. A bell ringing in the distance.

The rat is looking for me. It’s hungry. Johannes has told me not to leave the library — unless I want to get rid of all my longing, that is. That would be best for you, he said. No one can find peace in death with so much longing in their veins.

I replied that he too missed the world. Didn’t he too long for life? I asked.

He said nothing.

I told him I’d heard he even traveled to the other side sometimes. Was that true? Are there points where you can cross over?

Johannes laughed and said only the Druze can do that. Then he fell silent, as if his own laughter had saddened him.

I said people told me that whenever he disappeared for a while, he was over there.

“And you believed them? We’re dead, Josephine. No one crosses from the land of the dead to that of the living. No one. When someone dies, they’re dead.”

I know, I said. Do you think I don’t know?

He looked at me and said nothing.

But there are many things I don’t know yet. I know some things, and am ignorant of others. I’ve seen some things, and haven’t seen others. In the big hall I watch the people as they write. They move lightly whenever they get up to go to one of the water fountains, as if they’re swimming. People become lighter once they reach these parts. Their faculties are restored. The pain in their bodies falls away. In one of the corridors I see Hariri sitting and reading twenty pages. Each time he finishes, he starts over. There’s a single life story on each page. Those are the stories of the people who were killed with him in the explosion. The final page was written by the medic in the ambulance, the last vehicle of the motorcade. In another corridor — at one end of the library — I see the man who had a bomb explode beneath his car seat. This man used to be a writer. But writing is no easy task for him here. The words no longer come to him like they used to. He’s not sure how to write what he wants to write. He wants to write a note to his wife. He wears himself out writing five letters, five single characters. He can’t find a sixth one. He can’t find a second word. The blast is still ringing in his ears, the black smoke still thick in his eyes. The Alfa Romeo is a small car. The pressure of the explosion was horrible in that cramped space. He drinks some water and looks at the word on the white page. And as he looks at that name, the smoke clears and the blast recedes. He sees a long street between two rows of shops. He sees the many kinds of sweets in the storefront windows. This is Paris. He knows these red and yellow awnings. There’s the Librairie Gilbert. The restaurants of Saint-Germain. The full glasses. The drizzling rain. The cloth umbrellas. The baguettes. The heads of broccoli in front of the shops. The bottles of wine. He knows what he’ll write. But he needs time. He only just arrived. The place is still new to him. He needs sleep. He’ll write after he sleeps.

In another narrow corridor, a man is lying on a bed. His bare leg looks skeletal, wasted away. He rubs some ointment on it and takes a sip of water from a plastic cup.

In a different corridor, a man sits at a table and writes that he didn’t know what to do when he saw the flames envelop his friend’s body. He wanted to help him but couldn’t move. He couldn’t move because he had died before his friend, whose clothes were on fire. He was dead, but only realized it later.

The man engulfed in flames did not die then. They flew him to Europe. He underwent several operations. They grafted new skin onto him to repair the burnt surface of his body. He spent thirty days in intensive care, and still he did not die. But his lungs were full of smoke: he was exhaling it. And finally it choked him. He died. After his death he opened his eyes and saw himself walking among pine trees. There was a long staircase at the end of the trees. He went down the steps and found a green playing field. He walked around the field and exited through a steel gate onto a wide corniche. He stood on the sidewalk and looked at the sea. The vast blue sea stretched to infinity, like the sky. A light rain was falling from above. A sweet immaculate calm filled that land. He felt he wasn’t alone. He looked at the raindrops as they danced on the sea, as they jumped on the calm surface of the water, rising then falling, rising then falling, and felt drowsy.

The reading halls are teeming with readers. The green lamps there look beautiful. I can see them from a distance as I come to gather the books from the tables and reshelve them at the closing hour. The exchange of greetings. Water cups thrown in the trash bins. Steam on the windows. A young blonde in a red dress sits in a corner. A book with colored pictures lies open in front of her. I always see her in that corner, and she’s always reading the same book. She reads the book and plays with her wooden bracelets and her hair. She reads and drinks some water. Your heart soars when she looks at you. She has a way of looking at people — one that fills them with love for this world.

Beauty here is found on the inside. One man smells like lemons: he must have loved orange groves. Another man murmurs like a stream: he was an insomniac in the land of the living, but here that murmur puts him to sleep. In one of the halls a reader’s head is ringed with a halo of moonlight: that’s how he feels toward the land of the living. In another corridor, I hear an old man let out a sudden laugh — the laugh of a young boy.

Seeing these people leaves a taste under your tongue.

From their skin the women exude that moist air that follows the first autumn rain.

A man smells of cakes and manakish sandwiches: he was killed by sniper fire on his way to the bakery. He walks between the bookshelves with his back still bent — an old habit. I watch him as he opens one of the tomes and stands there to read. I point him toward an empty chair at an empty table. He thanks me. I bring him some water. He says he loves this book. I tell him that makes me happy.

I watch them and write about them, and I’m scared. I feel as if I’m falling, falling beyond known borders. I’m scared of them getting angry. Then I remember that these pages are my own. That I’m writing them for my own sake. That I’m writing them because I cannot do otherwise. But I write without ever losing this feeling: that I’m falling, that I’m beyond the borders of the world.

I once saw a man who wrote his story and then looked down at the words and found he did not understand his life. Without noticing it, he had written what was engraved on his tombstone in the land of the living. He read those words and dates and realized they said nothing. Those words were not his life. They had no value. He wanted to write down words that told his life. He had been a pastor beloved by his parish. Now he was a pastor no longer. How could he write about his life? What should he write? There used to be a pine tree in front of his church, its trunk covered in resin. He once saw a butterfly stuck in it. He took a knife and cut out a piece of the hardened resin with the butterfly inside. That’s what he wanted to write. That was his life.

I see a young woman, a woman my age, with marks on her face. I know she was killed by gunfire. I watch her read, and from time to time she turns around and looks in this direction. Is she looking at me or at the water cooler? There’s a water cooler here, by my table. What’s she thinking when she looks at the water?

I shouldn’t give in to black thoughts. There are rooms as cramped as coffins in the eastern wing. Each room barely has enough space for a table and a chair for a single person to sit on. Here is a man who used to write for personal gain, not for love of writing. He used to write for the sake of prestige. In this world he only writes a single sentence. “I write so as not to choke.” That’s the sentence. He has to write it over and over again on the page, from right to left, from top to bottom. The room, cramped as a coffin, is filled with white paper, stacks and stacks of it, and every night they bring more. They only take away the paper he’s blackened with that sentence. I write so as not to choke. If his hand gets tired from writing those words and slows down, the stacks of paper start to pile up over his head, suffocating him. There’s a small opening in the ceiling through which some air can enter. If the white pages close it, he chokes.

I am unable to comprehend all the laws of the library. I’ve been looking for certain books for years, but cannot find them. I’ve seen those books before, but where are they now?

I read a book about a city full of soil. It’s hard to move through all that dirt. People tend to be lazy there. If you open the door to your room, it’s difficult to close it again. The soil is heavy. How will you get the door closed now?

There’s a section of the library devoted to old manuscripts. It contains the prophecies of Spyridon the Miraculous. That man (who bore the name of the old saint) lived in Beirut at the end of the 18th century and foretold the unrest of 1860. The language of that time is strange, but I can understand it. He foretold many wars and wrote of an earthquake that would strike the Ottoman Empire two centuries after his death, whereupon the morning star would rise over Constantinople and the city would be flooded with water, and whales would swim from Jaffa to Latakia, over the ruins of the land of Syria. The pages of the manuscript are yellow. They crumble between your fingers.

On another side of the library the drawing halls can be found. There’s a woman drawing a horse. And there’s Gibran, who has discovered he does not have to write, so now he draws instead. He’s not happy with his drawings, he wants to erase them, but that’s forbidden. Each time he looks at one of his own illustrations he feels pain, and wants to stop.

There’s a tall window on one side of the drawing halls. There are fruit trees beyond the window. And there’s a round pond, and children feeding bread to the ducks.

There’s a wooden seat that I like out there, green and shaded by a cypress tree. I take a book and head over to it. The terraced fields below where I’m sitting are covered in carpets of green grass and beds of bright flowers. A cobblestone path runs through those fields. No, not cobblestone. Flat light-colored stones. I don’t go down there. I look at the stones from here as I read. I grow tired of reading and look up out of the words at the path cutting through the fields. Birds are chirping in the trees. A white cat emerges from a bush, then disappears into another one. I have a bottle of water with me. I drink and read some more, and think about Johannes’s words. Why did I leave the library? He said the rat’s hungry. So why did I leave the library and come to this park?

I once found a book when I was sitting here. I opened it, even though I wasn’t in the mood to read. But after reading the first sentence I found myself reading the second one, and then the third, and the fourth. It was a strange book. I read the whole thing and felt that I had not understood it. I understood it, and I didn’t. I told myself I needed to read it again.

Did I ever read it again? I can’t remember anymore. What book was it?

The memories escape me. Memories of the world of the living. And memories of this world too.

~ ~ ~

I read the first page, then the second, then the third. I read twenty pages. I pause between each page, trying to grasp what I’ve read. There are over two hundred words on a single page. I read short sentences, and long ones. I didn’t know these things about these people. Now I know. But what can you know from two hundred words? Not much. Life is short. It’s hard to know much. Now I know. I drink some water, look at the words, then get up. The corridor is filled with tomes.

When I heard the blast, I did not understand. It felt like a blade was slicing into my skull. I heard the explosion, and didn’t. I saw the burst of flames. A white cascade of fire, and cars soaring through the air. But I did not understand. I could not conceive it. It was as if I’d lost consciousness. I did not see the balconies of the Saint Georges Hotel coming down, but I saw the glass of the car shatter and melt. I saw the fire scorch our clothes. Then my eyes darkened, and it was as if I’d lost consciousness. When I opened my eyes, I was no longer in the burning car. I was standing by myself on Parliament Square. I was standing in the shade by the Abd Clock Tower and drinking a bottle of water.

The bottle was made of glass, like a Pepsi bottle. I drank it and set it down on the edge of the sidewalk. The Abd Clock Tower was a gift from Michel Abd to the city of Beirut in 1933. I love standing there. I love that square paved with black volcanic rock. During the war the whole area was a land of ghosts — a place of mines and death and barricades and burnt shops. I felt at peace as I stood in Parliament Square, at the Place de l’Étoile. I was not afraid. I was not riding in an armored car. I was not looking for my bodyguards or for familiar faces. Tranquility filled my body. Rarely could I walk through these streets at my leisure this way, the way I loved. I wanted to walk and look at the city.

I walked down Hussein al-Ahdab Street until the fountains near the Municipality. I could not hear the rippling of those fountains from inside the car. Now I could hear them. Eleven fountains. I stopped and looked at the clouds crossing the windows of the Municipality Building: It was built in the days of the French Mandate. It burned down during the long Civil War, and was later restored. The sky was vast and blue. Cars sped down Rue Weygand. The traffic’s always heavy on that street. It cuts horizontally through the old walled city of Beirut from the ancient gate of Bab Idris to that of Bab al-Saray, the Palace Gate. It’s a narrow street: there used to be a market there the people called souq al-fashkha.

I know many things now. I have more time to read. It was a clear day. The air was cold, but not unpleasantly so. I crossed Rue Weygand and turned onto Foch Street. But before I crossed Weygand I turned around and cast a final glance at the clock tower on Parliament Square. It was ten minutes to one in the afternoon.

The construction site of the Bank of Kuwait and the Arab World was on my right. On my left Youssef al-Rami Street, then Saad Zaghloul. The building with the Bank of Beirut — and the Springfield and Timberland stores — was splendid. I remembered what it looked like before it was restored. I remembered the crumbling balconies. I remembered the sculpted crowns covered in soot. Those stores are lustrous now. The walls are polished. Only the carefully trained eye can detect the traces of shrapnel and war.

Mutran Street on my left connects Foch to Allenby. The yellow Sky Gate hot air balloon, tethered to the ground, towers up over there, in the air above the Phoenicia Hotel and The Four Seasons. The construction is always starting and stopping, but a day will come when it is finished. The delays are temporary, all of them. One day the obstacles will be overcome. A building with a tall entrance: “1925” is engraved on its threshold. Those buildings.

The sea appeared. The Normandy Landfill appeared. And the fence of the naval base. The Foch Residence construction site. I looked at the map. There was number 7: the intersection of Foch and Al-Mina streets. And there was number 2: the Phoenicia. And the Beirut Tower? Where was the number for the Beirut Tower? A flock of pigeons passed by and I turned to follow it with my eyes. I forgot about the map (a handout from Solidere) and about the numbers. The pigeons flew through the air and hovered around the construction sites, hovered above the buildings and minarets. All the sites were still. It was as if the city were sleeping. I looked at my watch. Ten minutes to one in the afternoon. Was that possible? My watch hadn’t moved.

I walked from Foch Residence along the length of the sea road, toward West Beirut. I remembered that area from the war. I remembered the burnt soil and the stray dogs and the mice. I remembered the flies. People were afraid to pass through there because of the flies. I know a lot of things now. I’ve come to have time. I used to know things, but I’ve come to know more. I know things differently now. A lot of things. Pigeons have red feet. I did not sweat as I walked and looked at the birds. It was strange I wasn’t sweating. I was wearing a suit, and the sun was strong. It was February, true, but the sun was strong that day.

The Normandy Landfill site was still as well. We’ve got a wonderful Japanese design for the garden. A few years ago the smell of waste was awful here. Now the smell’s not so bad. A white cloud was swimming in the heights — a small cloud that looked like cotton. I could not hear the sea. The sea was still that day. The city too. Where were the people?

I passed by the seafront construction sites. I couldn’t see any workers. Where were the steel helmets and gloves and welding goggles? Was everyone on break? Were they eating now? I looked at my watch. Strange: it was still ten minutes to one.

I saw a flock of gulls fly over the yachts and land on the roof of the Saint Georges. I hadn’t reached it yet, but I could see the pink hotel from here. The white curtains were visible through the windows of its six floors. The gulls took off again and cut through space, disappearing over the sea. I wanted to drink something. All the walking had made me thirsty. I needed to find some more water. Should I go into a store and buy some? But I didn’t have any money with me. My bodyguards carry the money.

I stood and looked at the steel sign at the entrance to the Normandy Landfill. I read the words and dates. I turned and looked at the yachts, and at the Saint Georges and the Phoenicia. What was I looking for? I felt strangely at peace. I wasn’t looking for anything. I didn’t even really need water. I simply wanted to look at this city. To look at this sky. To look at these birds.

I stood and looked at Beirut. The sea was still as glass. Mount Sannin was crowned with snow. Sannin was white, and the sea was blue, and Beirut filled my eyes. I didn’t need anything. I looked at my watch: ten minutes to one in the afternoon.

How was that possible? We left the Étoile several minutes ago and it was still the same time.

I looked up at the sky. I did not see the sun in its blue vault. I saw the moon, as white as bone. A cascade of milky light streamed out, filling my sight: it was as sweet as water.

I closed my eyes.

Content

Rabee Jaber
The Mehlis Report

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