Beirut Blues by Hanan al-Shaykh Read Free Book Online Page A

away. I stood at the balcony rail watching them, remembering my village. The shepherd, unconcerned by the barking of his dog, seemed to be rolling a cigarette and lighting up. The Spaniard approached me, holding out a glass of wine. Then he stood next to me, resting his hand on the balcony rail, lord of all he surveyed. I pictured my grandfather dressed like him in a colored shirt and jeans, a cigar in his hand. My grandparents probably thought I would marry a man such as this and stand with him on our balcony, except that instead of the returning flocks we would have been surveying our fruit trees.
    Darkness fell gradually. The noise died away and calm settled over the place. It was as if the whole of nature werereemerging from the mouth of the night. Blackness engulfed the surrounding country, transforming everything into shadowy noiseless shapes. Even the cricket in the wood was taken by surprise at the coming of darkness and poised silently, not moving its wings.
    Footsteps sounded behind us, preventing me from telling the Spaniard that I too was a daughter of the land. They turned out to belong to an old man with a scowl on his face, who muttered a few words and then left. Our host smiled and invited us to go in to dinner. Minutes later a woman called Vera came in and kissed us all and asked which of us had just arrived from Beirut.
    I collapsed onto my seat. Beirut came back to haunt me, paralyzing my hands as I tried to eat, making me forget how relaxed I’d been here, in a country which still existed and was free from the chaos of warfare. I was used to the idea that there were places where people led normal secure lives and, although the reality made me uncertain and jealous, it had helped me forget what I’d seen and heard in the times of violence and siege. Now I wanted them to lower their eyes and listen to me, and I was desperate for the polite details to be done with. The old servant no longer had any excuse to come in and out with the dinner. I retreated into silence, waiting for their questions. They weren’t questions, but statements. The emotion in them was genuine but they were in a hurry to let the trivia take over the evening again. We rose to do a tour of the house. Big rooms. Big spaces. A big past. Then a small chapel. The Virgin Mary wide-eyed. Two small theaters, one with a huge movie screen.
    We paused in an enormous room which was empty exceptfor a large antique bed. The Spaniard picked up a book from the window seat, opened it, and pointed to a photo of the bed. I nodded my head admiringly, not bothering to work out what he meant. I was wondering what effect this bed would have had on me and Naser. Would we have laughed, and thrown ourselves down on it, or taken the mattress off and put it on the floor as we always used to when we were moving around a lot and didn’t like the look of a bed?
    I touched the gold and silver ornamentation on its four posts, which rose like the columns of a ruined building. We wouldn’t have liked its outlandishness, and its mattress was sure to be infested with dampness. We would have fled the empty room, fearing a trap.
    I drifted away from all these people to the rooms where Naser and I used to meet, and relived each room one by one. I met him in an ever-increasing variety of rooms: in beautiful houses with jasmine on their balconies, in buildings swarming with inhabitants, in foul houses which never saw the sunlight and where even the flies didn’t venture. The last room had no electricity, and the room before that was in a hotel where a friend of his lay in the other bed with a high fever, so that periodically he shouted out streams of nonsense, which we found amusing at the time. Sometimes they weren’t bedrooms but luxurious living rooms full of Palestinian artifacts in large empty apartments. Then there were rooms in the houses of his married friends, and I used to be filled with disappointment, because as soon as I heard the noise from inside, I knew I