A taxi driver leans forward and yells out his window, “Taxi?”
I take a deep breath, pull my head back. Sisyphus pretends not to notice me as he collects butts with a pair of extra-long tongs. Two youngsters behind the clean glass, a boy and a girl with Bakelite thighs, interrupt their duel of saliva to regard me quizzically, suspiciously. Their hands and bodies touch along many points, a languorous contact that speaks of desperation.
Touching, so alive, so bright, these teenagers. Before them, on the glass, my pale, silvery reflection superimposes itself. I recoil. Immortal age beside immortal youth.
But thy strong Hours indignant work’d their wills,
And beat me down and marr’d and wasted me.
A Diored woman sporting noteworthy high hair and wasp-stung lips slows her steps, hesitates near me, lifts up her sunglasses, concern showing on her face. I smile, grimace really, my ever-nervous gesture. I shake my head, indicating that I’m all right. Mild geriatric disorder is what this is, nothing more. No one needs to stop. She acknowledges my silent communication and moves on. I follow suit in the opposite direction. Air breathes up the back of my scarf. In front of a building grows — no, not grows, stands — a hewn rusty-hued bush of indecipherable leaves, of which only a few remain greenish. But of course, I–I would notice such a thing.
The woods decay, the woods decay and fall.
Have I grown too old for Beirut?
Beirut, my Beirut.
Around the corner from the building I live in is a Pizza Hut outlet that proudly identifies itself as DELIVERY ONLY. If you happen to walk in, maybe to ask for directions, or possibly to inquire whether anyone knows what happened to the owner of the store they’ve just replaced, the young men regard you condescendingly before announcing that they only take phone orders.
The store these smug, ill-mannered boys replaced was an idiosyncratic record shop that opened its doors two days before the civil war broke out, and surprisingly kept open throughout the fighting. The owner — a portly, mustached Beiruti of indeterminate age and sect — rarely bothered to hoist his ample behind out of his chair. He always seemed oblivious to anything occurring outside the expansive world of his store. Come to think of it, he barely noticed anything outside his own mind, so content was he, so self-sufficient and complete. Nongarrulous Beirutis are as rare as vivid primary colors in the snowy Arctic, yet here we were, two of us, patient sufferers of verbal sclerosis, not more than a hundred meters apart.
Ever the autodidact, I used his store to teach myself. When he opened for business, I knew little about music. I kept track of mentions in the novels I read. For example, I first heard of Mozart’s Sinfonia Concertante in Styron’s book Sophie’s Choice—a beautiful if somewhat soppy novel, and an unbearable film. I heard of Kathleen Ferrier when Thomas Bernhard mentioned her uplifting rendition of Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde in Old Masters.
In my thirties all I understood was Chopin, glorious Frédéric. To thank me for finding a rare book, a college student offered me an invaluable gift, a double album of Artur Rubinstein playing Chopin. I didn’t have a record player at the time and had to save up before I was able to listen to it. Once I did, Artur’s spirit wafted through my home. I played my record over and over and over and over. I bought a cleaning and care kit for albums. Once a week I delicately wiped the damp cloth across the disc to ensure it remained playable for eternity. It was the only album I had for years, and the only music I listened to. To this day, I can probably whistle the melody of Ballade no. 1 in G Minor without having to think about it. I became a Chopinophile.
Even now, I think that if I’d never listened to anything else, I’d still consider myself a lucky human being. This was Rubinstein. This was Chopin. Pole playing Pole. But I had a yearning. Sometime in the early eighties, while my city was self-immolating, while everyone around me was either killing or making sure he wasn’t going to be killed, I decided it was time I taught myself how to listen to music.
I visited the fat man’s store and looked through his stacks of records. I didn’t buy anything until the fifth visit. By that time, my fingers, imitating Olympic short-distance racers, could sift through a stack of albums in seconds. I couldn’t tell where to begin, which pianist was better than the other. I knew to begin with the famous composers (Bach, Beethoven, Mozart) but couldn’t settle on which versions. I made a somewhat arbitrary choice. I decided I would select albums from the Deutsche Grammophon label.
You might ask why, which is a good question.
Don’t laugh.
The way I looked at it at the time was that the composers were German (or German-speaking), so Deutsche Grammophon just seemed logical. Don’t you think?
But also, I just thought the design was classy; the yellow rectangle label added a touch of panache. I always wished for a touch of panache in my life.
It turned out to be a good decision, a great decision, though limiting at first. I didn’t know about Gould’s Goldberg Variations for ages. Someone could have saved me a lot of time by explaining things, or by pointing out that I should have listened to the bourrée from Bach’s English Suite no. 2 (Englische Suiten!) much earlier, instead of finding it by accident on a Pogorelic´ disc. What if I had missed it? The hours of pleasure I wouldn’t have known.
If only I had someone to tell me every now and then, “Aaliya, you must listen to Scarlatti’s sonatas, fils, not père.”
If only I had someone to guide me, the pillar of cloud going before me on my wanderings, to lead me and show me the way. If I had someone to offer me the benefit of her attentions.
The queen calls to her worker ants. Come back, come back, don’t go there.
I bought my Deutsche Grammaphon albums from the fat man — two a month, one with each paycheck, which was all I could reasonably afford. Beethoven came first, of course, piano works followed by the violin sonatas (Kreutzer still delivers shivers), and so on.
On the weekday my paycheck was to be deposited, I would sneak a peek out my living room window, through a tiny vertical crack between the louvered wood, and gauge whether Azari’s green shutters were up, which would mean that the bank branch in my neighborhood might be open and I had to unlock the bookshop’s doors. More likely than not, the record store would be open regardless of fighting. On my way to work, I’d stop at the bank for cash, and on the way home, I’d stop at the store for an album, one of the few rituals I looked forward to in those days. I’d plan in advance the next five or six albums I was going to purchase, the early, the middle, and then the late quartets. I would agonize over deciding whether a double album was one purchase or two.
The portly owner sat on a high toothpick of a barstool and still had to look up to me. He rarely spoke, yet as we began to know each other and feel comfortable, he’d grunt approval with every purchase. When I first bought The Sofia Recital by Richter, he of the pink plastic lobster, the shop owner’s smile floated toward me like a leaf on a river. With Martha Argerich’s Début Recital, his face wore the three-foot grin of an alligator. After such high praise, walking the three-building distance home was torture; I couldn’t wait to listen. And when I bought my first Gould, his eyebrows climbed up his forehead, his eyes shot up to the ceiling. Finally.
On new album days, while a war raged around me and chaos ruled, I felt triumphant.
Buying music was almost my sole expense but not, of course, my sole luxury. I have far more books than I have albums, far more, but I didn’t buy most of them. Do not judge too harshly. I’ve had to live on a minuscule salary. No one was making any money on my bookstore’s sales. The owner kept it open because he was proud of its reputation among Beirut’s pseudointellectuals and high priests of literature as the only place in the city where one could find obscure books, which none of them read. These literary dilettantes know books about as well as an airline passenger knows the landscape he overflies; they talk about novels in highlights as if they’re reading a fashion magazine. I ordered books, and if no one bought them, I carried them home. I’ll admit that sometimes I ordered two of each just to make sure — all right, sometimes three.