The lives of the AUB students add color to Bliss Street. It’s the most beautiful street in Beirut in his opinion, despite its terrible traffic, lights, and noise. Heavily armed soldiers stand on the sidewalk. He’s used to seeing this and always wonders if it doesn’t frighten tourists and foreign students. The war is coming, the war never left. He feels he is always at war, fighting in wartime and fighting in peacetime. There they are imposing their clout by carrying their “legal” weapons. We should always be precise in describing the weapons used: there are legal and illegal weapons which different factions proudly use to govern their relationships — wars that are sometimes cold and sometimes hot.
The character of the weapon that disfigured her face — a face of such beauty he’d never seen before — doesn’t matter to him. She will live. She must live so he can tell her that they’d met before. He would look after her. He fears he will lose her. He is now officially afraid of death, fearing the death of others before his own death. Previously he had enjoyed immunity to death. Now he was losing his immunity and she was the reason. He had resolved this matter after making peace with death.
But now, faced with death, he feels impotent. It’s a game he hates, the game of life. He rejects it, but cannot elude it.
He left her sleeping in the frost, alone.
He passes by this place every day in his car. Today he is walking on the sidewalk which witnessed the most beautiful moments in his life, the series of romances which he experienced during his first years at the university. He walks, remembering the names of restaurants and bookshops that used to be here and have now had their spots taken by other restaurants, restaurants with global or “globalized” names that he can’t enter. He won’t forget his places — Uncle Sam’s bookshop and Uncle Sam’s restaurant too, Basha restaurant and the B-25 café. He heard so much about the restaurant called Faisal’s, which in his father’s years at the university was more famous than the university itself. It was just across from the main gate; writers and intellectuals gathered there alongside university students who were, according to his father’s recollections, “more mature than students today — they went to the university wearing suits, respecting the opportunities made available to them, the opportunity to receive a university education.” He wondered about his father’s concern with the suits worn by his generation of university students, and the relationship between these suits and their academic achievements.
He turns left, going up toward Hamra Street. He passes Stars, the shop for musical instruments that somehow hasn’t yet closed down. The imposing thick, white iron door next to Stars had been the entrance to a video shop that his brother’s friend ran. It had lasted only two years before it closed. He continues a little farther, looks to his right, and then raises his head. That’s where his childhood friend Manal lived, up on the top floor of the large building on the corner where the bar Under Water used to be. That’s the first bar he ever entered and cast aside his self-consciousness around women. He remembers that the bar was through the second door after the main entrance to the building. The shop between the two doors sold used English-language books. Rashid was a shy boy, particularly self-conscious around women, and didn’t brag about his wet dreams like his friends did. He would secretly rent adult films from the video shop near the bar so no one would discover his secret; meanwhile his friends, the other boys in the neighborhood, would watch the films together in one of their bedrooms, when their parents were out, of course. In the bar Under Water, Rashid abandoned his shyness about women’s bodies, touching their secrets. His imagination was transformed there into flesh and blood, into stories words couldn’t relate, indeed into the curves of “Lilly’s” body. He remained self-conscious in front of Lilly both before and after they sat together. Only when she dragged him behind the wine-colored curtain in the back of the bar and put his hand between her breasts then moved it all over her body did he forget his shyness. He used to plan his trips to the bar on the weekends when Manal was away from Beirut with her family, at their house in the mountains.
In her East Side apartment on the top floor of the Sarmad Building, his childhood friend Manal committed suicide. She was twenty-two. During that time, he was practically living in the university library. He had passed his medical school exams. He hadn’t seen her in months. At their last meeting in the Three Roses café, she seemed enthusiastic about a project renovating the interior of a clothes shop, showing him her designs. He noticed that she was calmer than usual. He thought that she had grown up and left behind the tumult that glistened in her eyes. Then came the news one Sunday morning. He was eating breakfast. He remembers every detail of the scene: His house phone rang. His friend Nader was on the line, a mutual friend of his and Manal’s. Nader was sobbing. How did she get the rope? Where did she find the strength to tie it around her delicate neck? How did no one in the house notice that the sounds coming from her room weren’t normal? She locked the door with a key and claimed that she would need some time alone, that she wanted to read without anyone disturbing her. She prepared carefully for her last night. She pulled the rope around her neck and jumped into the unknown. She ended. Since that day, he had put off thinking about what happened. He imagined her neck all blue and purple, and her face bloated with absence. He didn’t want to explore the details; he didn’t want to review their friendship in order to understand the reasons that she terminated her life.
He walks as though taking revenge on his memory. He takes big footsteps. The face that changed him appears once more to him. Yara. Her name is Yara. Her name suggests another place and time, before they came together. She must stay here, in the world that brings the two of them together. He can’t explain his obsession with her. But he’s dying to know everything about her. What was she doing in that alleyway? He knew she didn’t live there. He’d met her mother. He was self-conscious in front of her agony and completely understood it, even before glimpsing her face. He had an understanding of the suffering of patients’ relatives, but deep within himself he ignored this suffering. Her mother was in a state of hysteria. She oscillated between anger — which she translated to him through a torrent of insults directed against the country and its people — and sarcasm, which would sometimes prompt banter and laughter about her condition and that of her daughter. He saw no other family members, only her mother. He wished he could sit next to her, hold her hand, and transmit to her some of the warmth he felt toward her. He loved the sallowness of her face and lips, he knew them, he knew the shape of her eyes and the nightdress that covered her skin. He had seen her before, in that dream he can’t forget. He dreamed it before he saw her, before he was afflicted by the ever-present disease of fear.
He dreamed about a chair that he put next to her bed in the intensive care unit. Now he walks, holding her hand bound with tubes that provide her with life.
He walks in his Beirut. This city is like a giant village, a village unlike any other village, or any other city. He used to say that despite its new ugliness, Beirut still enjoys a certain charm that he doesn’t know how to explain. He doesn’t say this anymore. During his walk he searches for a charming setting. By day he tends to move between less ugly parts of the city and those with actual charm, if that’s the right way to put it. He lives in what are called Beirut’s “bubbles.” There are neighborhoods in the city he hasn’t visited since he was a schoolboy at the end of the seventies and the beginning of the eighties; there are other neighborhoods he’s never visited at all.