He carries Yara with him, perhaps he doesn’t feel afraid for her. How can he fight fear when it is percolating inside him, becoming a part of him? Perhaps it is a temporary state. He saw her wounded face in his dream before he saw her in real life. In the hospital he succeeded in hiding his shock. Then when he was alone, his obsessions and fears were born. Was the day’s exhaustion enough to make him hallucinate or was he experiencing the symptoms of some disease? He raises his hand to his face, then sticks it on his forehead. He needs to sleep. Perhaps he will wake up tomorrow and have lost this terrible fear. He needs to pass by and see her tomorrow, because he is the surgeon who saved her from death as her mother keeps saying. He laughs. What kind of savior-hero do others think he is? What kind of savior-hero does he himself think he is? He walks. He is no longer able to move quickly. Tomorrow he will see her. Will she regain consciousness tomorrow? Perhaps he’ll wake up tomorrow and be cured from this disease, from this beautiful curse.
He walks right through the chaos of a long Beirut night. He listens to the distant sounds of fireworks, as if they’re faraway explosions that keep repeating. This violence is the expression of joy; this violence is the expression of all kinds of emotions. He is walking through Beirut while it’s shedding the veneer of civilization. How can a respected doctor like him be so lost? He walks quickly like a man searching for his mind. He tells himself that tomorrow he will resist her pallid face and closed eyes. He will resist her lips that are searching for the kiss of life. Tomorrow he will resist fear. Why is he now fighting against night and its mysteries? He should go up to his apartment to collect himself before sleeping. He misses dreamless sleep, unless Yara decides to visit him. What is this loss that tortures him? He feels her lying beside him. She is here sleeping in his bed just like she is sleeping in the hospital — absent, infatuated with absence, haggard, and beautiful. He wants to sleep, and doesn’t want tomorrow to be like today. This is what he’s gotten used to in Beirut. This is what he learned from it. He should sleep now to live tomorrow, another Beirut day.
In the morning he has to shower quickly. He has to be at the hospital before eight. He doesn’t think while putting on his clothes. He’s still exhausted from wandering around yesterday. He is also afflicted by the exhaustion of the long years that came before this. He glances up at the sky as he leaves the building. The Beirut sky is so beautiful! The color of the sky here is spectacular. He looks up the whole time walking from home to the hospital. When he turns left the dogs bare their teeth. They arrived early from their morning excursion and have already started their security patrol. The dogs are in charge, he has to smile at them and fully acknowledge their extraordinary capabilities and their terrifying appearance.
When will he hear Yara’s voice? When will he contemplate her eyes, open to the world? He ran all night long. He ran in his sleep, listening to himself panting. In the dream he arrived at the fourth floor of the hospital. He dashed through the corridor leading to the intensive-care unit. The lights were out. For the first time he recognized the darkness in that room, as if it were abandoned. Darkness enveloped the place and there was no sign of the young woman at all, nor of her mother. There was no one there to ask about what happened to the injured woman who was here just a few hours earlier. Then he woke up to the sound of the alarm clock.
When he reaches the fourth floor, his colleague who had been monitoring her was being paged. Her heart suddenly got tired; his heart almost stops. He still doesn’t understand why he cares so much about her. It’s as if his heart is suspended with her heart. He feels an exhaustion that he’s never experienced before. He peers out the window of his clinic in the hospital at the Beirut sky, muttering, “Oh Beirut sky, save me.” Then he carries on with his day. Her face is an enigma, and she is slipping through his fingers. When he enters her room, he tries to evaluate her sleeping face. If she wakes up, he’ll have a brand-new life.
Originally written in Arabic.
Without a Trace
by Mohamad Abi Samra
Raouché
I stopped walking in the middle of a path in the public park. Images, ideas, echoes of words sunk into my wandering consciousness. I was struck by the memory of a laughing, silent face, but I don’t know whose. Absentmindedly, I glimpsed a feeble sunbeam on a row of trees at the end of the street where I begin my evening walk a bit before sunset every day. A young woman on a bicycle, wearing fancy exercise gear, passed me by. Then she crossed back in front of me and gave me a curious glance, making me realize I was standing frozen like a statue in the middle of the empty path. I smiled and waved at her, while she wound away on her bike down another path, fading from sight.
Why did I smile at her? Did she notice the wave of my hand, or did it simply pass into oblivion? Like my words and movements that had sometimes started coming too late recently, it was as if a little opening had swallowed it up before it was completed. Suddenly, involuntarily, I burst out laughing. And in the little opening I noticed my own reflection in the image of that other unknown laughing face that had returned to my wandering consciousness just moments before.
When did that long, carefree laugh stop emerging from within me? I thought while quickly turning down the narrow pathway into which the bicycle woman had disappeared. I couldn’t find any trace of her. In the shadow of her absence, a bygone memory emerged. It involved my little sister Vera, whom I have not seen for years, whom I rarely call, and who rarely calls me from Paris. I’m not even sure what time and place this was.
Fast and fading, the years retreat and vanish in time. Though my body started to become sluggish without me noticing, every moment became a nice memory — like my smile and the wave of my hand. They remained precariously suspended in emptiness. Like people wandering through the public park without a trace. Like my face, giggling in the forgotten memory, which caused more than half of my life to flash by in an instant. Like the laugh, which escaped from me involuntarily just a moment ago, but which had died years before I left Beirut for Los Angeles — more than twenty years ago now.
I exited the gate of the public park. The cool, light evening breezes revived the damp skin on my face. I walked along the sidewalk, heading toward my little but recently renovated ground-floor apartment in an old three-story building.
The glow of lampposts hung motionless over the street and sidewalk. The men and women passing by, myself included, were few and distant from one another. We were a mysterious being, strange and unknown, in a transient present which perhaps makes it forget itself and who it is. Perhaps the transient present extracts it from itself or preys on it, so it separates from its life. I enjoy this fleeting presence of humans, similar to how I enjoy the frozen, suspended memories that float through my vagrant vision when I pause in front of my living room window each morning. It’s an external scene that the windowpane keeps me separated from — faraway, distant, invisible, present only in my seclusion, no one can see me but myself. Every morning, I stand behind that pane of glass, separating myself from the things in that static, outside world that makes my vision wander. I imagine myself a person in an Edward Hopper painting that I’ve inhabited and has inhabited me, by virtue of how much I’ve stared at it. I begin to think the painting depicts and narrates moments from my life.