Only a short time passed before I got used to the place and started going there without Harut. This made me feel more relaxed. Something led me to Paradisio like I was bewitched. I didn’t think about my future there, or my past in my village, or the shaky and unstable present in which I was living... as if I were on a swing.
I am the little plant uprooted from in front of the doorstep of our house. No longer planted in soil, my aerial roots extend upward, suspended in midair, not touching any land at all. Who am I? For a time I was not Majd the village kid, and of course I was not a city kid either. I wasn’t Christian or Muslim; I wasn’t Lebanese or Armenian. I tried hard to be something but I couldn’t. Who am I? When did I become a monster who didn’t dare scare anyone but himself, because he was so distant from his fluid self, like a colorless liquid, a self whose truth he didn’t show until he forgot it? I am merely what others want to see... When did I start taking on this role? How and why?
My anger at myself, Beirut, and Lebanon perhaps didn’t stop at the Paradisio, but I eventually did calm down and forget the bitter taste filling my mouth for a little bit. The place game me distance from my questioning and my reality that made me homeless and without an identity in Lebanon, the distant Lebanon that still didn’t know me and neither did I know it. Here alone did I dare to separate out the features of my face as I used to see them in the mirror every evening. Here alone I cast off my face, my age, my body, my sexual desires; I reconciled with my old age and accepted it, as befits my feeling that I don’t belong. Exactly like the poker machine, which doesn’t distinguish between one player and another. Thus I was there alone... free of Harut, my family, and my love for Tamara. Unrestrained by these chains, I didn’t have to speak, think, or concentrate on anything. I used to lose money there with massive pleasure, as though I were spending a part of my life that I didn’t want. I was donating it to the devil. To counterbalance this, I returned once again to give from my pocket what I had won yesterday and buy new clothing for the naked angel of my dreams.
I don’t know how this happened, but one day I suddenly noticed I was totally immersed, to the point of being almost in a coma, in the body of this machine of fleeting death, this machine of the next life. This machine of dreams. Perhaps the four red hearts on the colored screen in front of me were my sure win in the carré ace game, the special prize dedicated to someone who got lucky that night. For moments the place returned to reality and the people had to wake up for a few minutes and everyone around me started to yell with joy or greed, cursing their luck, feeling deep jealousy, before returning to their previous state — that is to say, disconnected from reality. But none of this matters. Only one voice filled my ears and it didn’t care about the amount that Avo, the owner of Paradisio, gave to me with his own hand.
I hadn’t informed anyone where I was. Did my mother send him after me because it was my birthday and everyone wanted to surprise me because I always ran away from these kinds of occasions? Was it the sound of the explosion that thundered a bit earlier and shook up my heart for a minute but that I ignored? This wasn’t the first time I stayed out very late during intensive bombardments. Was it because of the party’s state of alert, fearing a surprise attack?
“Inch beses, Harut?” — What’s up? — I asked in Armenian. He didn’t answer but grabbed my hand and led me outside.
I don’t know how much time passed with me over there driven into the ground like a nail. Did I die all of a sudden and arrive at the gates of hell with the tongue of the flames of hellfire charring my face? As we approached my apartment building, the sounds of little explosions, one after another, increased because of gas canisters in people’s apartments and cars parked both in front of the building and under it. These sounds brought me back to reality but I was not sure that I had really returned. It seemed to me as if I were observing the scene from above, or from behind a transparent curtain. I saw the paramedics, Party and civilian ambulances, armed men belonging to the official security forces and the militias. Women and men in nightgowns and pajamas, party clothes and normal clothes. Babies and children and teenage boys and girls and old people. Toys were flying through the air, mixed with papers, arms and legs, and dreams. All of it seemed tenuous, light, and floating, hovering above land without gravity. Is this Resurrection Day? Have the dead risen?
Hurry, there are people alive, hurry, there are corpses, hurry, there’s someone burning and he’s alive, there’s someone choking and he’s alive, someone trying to lift a wall off his shattered skull, without hands... Hurry... hurry, there’s the voice of a child.
“Hurry, they’re alive... Majd, they are alive, hurry up!” Harut called from the seventh hell or seventh heaven, I don’t know... I’d gotten separated from him when I saw the bloodied faces of my family, their closed eyes, black dust obscuring their features and everything else. Were they sleeping, had they lost consciousness, were they alive, or were they simply dead?
I didn’t dare approach the ambulance and I didn’t even have a desire to accompany them. In reality, I couldn’t. All I could do was run — run or fly — toward the port with Harut’s voice ringing in my ears as though it were coming from another world: “Where are you going? You have to come with me to the hospital, they may be alive... Come back... come back...”
But I kept running like someone penetrating an endless, closed in, red-hot fog. I couldn’t feel any part of my body. I became an errant, gelatinous mass of that angry air that Beirut breathed. I was a screaming voice, weighed down by pain I couldn’t bear. How could Harut dare to call me to come back?
Did he not see the lock of incandescent fire from Tamara’s red hair silently fading into the blood flowing from Zeina’s sliced open cheek? Is it conceivable that I alone saw her translucent shoulders, like my passionate desire for her, embracing like two stems of broken lilies, pinned down like a murdered dove among the bodies of my family and the others?
I saw her hair, I saw her shoulders, and I saw my life extinguished at that moment. Her red hair, which for so long had excited my passion, my dreams, and my hopes, was a volcano. Here it is now — like everything else — smoldering in front of me, and sleeping...
Come back? Come back to whom?
On the tenth day of the tenth month that year, a little bit before midnight, I stole onto that unknown ship, which was carrying boxes of red apples. The ship was ready to leave from the port of Beirut. I never came back.
Originally written in Arabic.
Bird Nation
by Rawi Hage
Corniche/Ashrafieh
It is a contested fact that wheat is behind the current global obesity epidemic. Many new studies claim that newly genetically modified wheat is the decisive factor in, among other mental and physical complications, weight gain. Let us take, as a specimen, the Lebanese population and thoroughly scrutinize the subject, so that we might deduce whether wheat and its derivatives are, in fact, a grand contributor to the obesity of this small nation. We observe that obesity is most visible in the rulers, politicians, and, certainly, the clerical class.
The use of utensils at the Lebanese table is not essential. The fork and the spoon were originally absent, introduced only during French rule of the region. But there was no need for them at all because the Lebanese had found a way to use their thin bread as both a grabbing device and a scooping utensil. This practice, one must admit, is an ingenious way of preserving both autonomous and hygienic practice in a cuisine that encourages sharing and the communal consumption of food. Each person rips off a small piece of bread and uses it to handle the food and consume it. He or she will go on to take a new, freshly ripped piece of bread to scoop or grab again. In this manner, every bit of food is consumed, and every consumption uses a new and clean utensil.