Dusty, gray, and sticky, like that oily layer on the skin of my Party journalist friend’s face, moments from those Beirut days at the beginning of the war are present in my memory now. I used to figure that the day’s hot, mucous-like stickiness would only soil me as a curious spectator. That stickiness would be kneaded in things and objects, like vomit, as if it were its original material. As if it were a coagulated substance in the bodies of humans and their relationships, meetings, words, and voices; in streets, places, and houses at all times. While they slept and when they woke up late in the morning, a magnetized tinfoil fog would stain the city’s low-hanging sky. They would walk on the ground with heavy aborted footsteps, as if they were battling through a womb’s serum mixed with urine and dirt on the asphalt on sticky days, and nights when opaque, scarce lights resembled a carbon fog on faces... I moved through these moments with my journalist friend, as if she were my blind guide born of the womb of that world, as if I were a guide for her slow emergence onto its shores.
Was I truly a spectator standing on the shores of this world that Beirut drowned in years before I left it? Were there even shores over there? I don’t know.
I didn’t step into the small, glass shower stall. Naked, walking barefoot in the corridor to my bedroom, the feel of the threads of the small silk rug in front of my wardrobe sent soft tremors from my feet to the edges of my naked body. With my own eyes I glimpsed the anonymous person, the narrator of imaginary scenes of my life, my nakedness illuminated by the dusty light emanating from two old lamps covering the glass of two small wooden bedside tables. The dusty light behind me drowned things in the room in still, concealed shadows and I imagined the light intimate and pale on my naked back. I passed the palm of my hand ever so slowly over the small dark-blond freckles on my shoulders. All of the men whom I’ve gotten naked for have rubbed their lips on these freckles that the Beiruti-Baalbaki painter once told me were stars extinguished on my skin. He was the only one of my men in Beirut who I’d responded to, agreeing to be — though I was fifteen years younger than him — an extramarital lover who didn’t ask him one question about it.
I reach my hand out to open the drawer of my wardrobe and I suddenly realize that it’s this painter who is the one now inspiring me to remember the scenes of my life. Months ago, I learned that he’d died in Beirut. I push my hands between my clothes hanging in the wardrobe. The mild, refreshing cold — my neglected clothes cool in their sleepy, intimate neutrality — slinks from a long black dress onto my hands and skin, so I take it out, unfold it, and hug it to my chest. Its soft cloth revitalizes my breasts while hanging on my naked body all the way down to my legs. Here in this very room, I’d put it on fifteen years earlier, and was overwhelmed by my breasts, back, and naked arms reflected in the mirror. So I’d put on a black sweater and went to my mother’s funeral. And isn’t this also the same dress I’d worn in my role as a “lady of the night” on my rendezvous with my Kurdish poet in Beirut?
Is this one of the many dresses that my colleague and only friend from the art institute left at my parents’ house when I let her stay with us, after my sister Vera left for Paris?
The institute was a residential building on a small hill near the Raouché coast and its famous rock. After being the only female teacher at the institute where all the other professors were men, I met my friend after the administration contracted her to teach lessons missing from the full-time professors’ schedules. During the first five years of the war, the female teachers all immigrated or retired — one after the other — until not one other remained in the institute.
Years before I started teaching I heard stories from my artist and journalist friends about the institute in the time before the war, all of which centered around its professors who had once been students there. From the strands of these stories, I concluded that they were men from modest backgrounds and families, new to the city, who in their school years had mixed with female students of urban families who could afford luxury. These young women would enroll in the institute for a period of time, and their liberation would take on an affected character. They paraded beauty, the feminine body, and its elegant fashions in the theaters of public daily life. In the time before the war, the institute was one of these theaters. It mixed liberation, the glitter of art, and the fashion parade — and this made its students stars who diffused their glamorous, intoxicating brilliance out of the reach of the eyes and imaginations of the male students of more modest backgrounds. These men were obsessed, infatuated, and crushed by their female colleagues’ charms — for example, their burning love and infatuation with the girls working in beauty salons and clothing shops, imitating the cinema and singing stars of the 1960s. But what truly surprised me was that in the stories of their burning passion for their female colleagues, the former-student teachers would identify them by their family names, saying that this one or that one was a girl from one family or another, as though they were announcing the brand names of luxury goods. I found it strange that this or that narrator would say that he had forgotten the name of his female colleague, a student whom he had been obsessed with and blindly subservient to for a year or two or three... He’d sat with her in classrooms, drawing studios, the institute cafeteria, and the city’s coffeehouses. I surmised that the young women of the stories were nothing but reflections of their notable families’ lives of luxury and affluence in the eyes and imaginations of young men hungry for lives of luxury and affluence. They didn’t touch those girls except when they were alone daydreaming and masturbating. I said that once, giggling loudly, during a session where which some of the institute’s male teachers were telling these old stories, shortly after I had started teaching just at the end of the first years of the war, 1975 and 1976.
At that time, academic life in the institute — teachers’ meetings, relationships, and daily get-togethers — had started to become colored by creeping rivalry, discord, and rumors circulating among the professors and students who belonged to political parties and armed groups fighting in the streets. A few days after I began teaching — and I didn’t want to do this, but I reluctantly submitted my request to the institute administration for contractual teaching hours, my answer to the insistence of the leader of the Communist Party’s intellectual cell — I heard that my request would have been denied were it not for the intervention of the party leadership and its pressure on the administration. At first I was the only female teacher, so the presence of another woman in the institute delighted me — from the moment I saw her in a long black dress, with slits up the side and revealing the top of her chest. Soon, my initial, fleeting encounters with her alerted me to the need of having any woman at my side in this sexist place. Days after this female colleague started teaching, rumors started to spread around the male professors that she was the lover of a failed lawyer from a modest background, who had risen through the ranks of an armed group to help to establish both it and its leader who had been a cleric before his disappearance three years after the beginning of the war.