My friend laughed and got up from the chaise longue, saying, “All male children, I will bear twins after twins, and not like the four female children that his cousin my co-wife bore for him in his village in the south where they live in his parents’ house.” I was hearing the word co-wife for the first time and I imagined an old blind woman in a painting of the Greek countryside.
But I followed my friend’s words and thoughts, telling her, “You’ll visit her there and help her go on a diet. With his fake hair and marriage to you, the director will rekindle his desire for her and not divorce her. He might also regain his Communist commitment from the days when he was a school teacher in the village, before he left the Party and travelled to France to get a doctorate in philosophy, which led to his appointment as director of the Art Institute.”
After a while my friend told me that she invited him to dinner at a seaside restaurant and he told her that in his doctoral dissertation he had analyzed manifestations of the Nietzschean philosophy of power in the personality in Imam Ali ibn Abi Talib’s book Nahj al-Balagha, or The Way of Eloquence, and in Imam Khomeini’s school of Islam. After the two of them had left the restaurant, my friend continued, he dared to put his hand on her thigh where her dress was pulled back, as she was driving the car. I laughed, telling her that he was remembering the revolution of power in his dissertation, but just as quickly she shouted, “No, no... he wasn’t remembering anything!” Then she laughed, saying that he asked her to end her relationship with me because I was an Armenian slut. Suddenly, I begged her to bring him to my place one evening. She liked the idea and I realized that she — with no explanation — had already intuited what I was thinking. We would agree on the nature of the evening and its purpose, even down to the implications of her conditions — that she would leave us alone at home, the director and me, and she would depart at the end of the night.
Months had passed with her staying with me at my parents’ house. On the evening of the invitation, I intentionally put on a long sky-blue dress whose thin cloth revealed my body’s curves. When I opened the door to them, I swallowed laughter upon seeing a pile of jet-black hair on the director’s head. I welcomed them and brought them into the living room, congratulating the director on his new hair, but I surprised him and myself by saying to him, with a smile, that his baldness used to entice me. He stared silently at my face for a moment before moving his gaze onto my body and stabilizing it at the tops of my thighs, and I asked him if he liked my dress. My friend answered that the dress — her dress — was more beautiful on my body than her body, saying to the director, “Look, look, isn’t she just like Mary Magdalene — why don’t we use her as a drawing model at the institute?” Then she turned on the large crystal chandelier hanging from the high ceiling, and the lights of its many lamps were diffused throughout the expansive living room. I wanted to say that women’s bodies seem bald when they are free of clothes, but I turned quickly toward the door of my room, explaining that I would change the dress I was wearing for another one. The director mentioned that we were alone in the house, that no one among us was a stranger, and that his wife wore a red dress like mine after she went into the hotel room and took off her white wedding gown. I nodded and headed toward a seat in the living room. But I quickly stopped, since a new scene suddenly loomed in my imagination: the director on a bed in a hotel room, tearing a see-through red dress off the body of a woman. It then occurred to me that I was the woman whose dress was ripped off on the bed, here in my room, after my friend had left at the end of the evening.
Originally written in Arabic.
The Death of Adil Uliyyan
by Abbas Beydoun
Ras Beirut
The café was almost empty. Two men were sitting at a corner table playing cards with unusual silence for a game around which crowds of spectators usually gather and work their tongues. They seem to be playing more from boredom than anything else, faced with empty tables and pervasive silence. I sat down and after a while one of them, a young, khaki-clad man, approached me. As he walked over, I could make out that he was older than I had suspected from a distance. He shook my hand and asked me what I wanted. When I ordered tea, he told me that the water had been cut off since the morning and it would be better to order a Pepsi. I agreed, in order to avoid further conversation, but the man kept standing right there in front of me, not moving. He stared at me as though waiting for me to recognize him. Then he told me that he knew me. He said he was Samir Uliyyan, the son of Adnan — Adil Uliyyan’s brother — who had apparently told them a lot about me; I am Jahal Mazhar. He told me that Adil had come back from Beirut ill, that they had found something in his stomach. I asked him where Adil Uliyyan was living, and he said that he had built a place in Rweiss, on some land he had bought there.
I didn’t meet Adil Uliyyan until we’d both moved to Beirut. I’d moved here before him, to attend the American University. I rented a house and settled down in the city. But I’d heard what had happened to him in Beirut and most of it was what I would have expected: cruel machinations and scams. He traded in elections. He’d go up to a village and choose a candidate who he was convinced could be the victor. He’d use his influence over certain officials, telling them he had to have a certain amount of money. It’s not important what the ballot boxes said plainly the morning of the elections, he would capture the amount needed to win, then disappear. I heard that he’d belonged to influential parties during the war, struggling within them to achieve a certain rank, rallying around and causing trouble until the party leadership got tired of him and kicked him out. But he always found his way to another party, wreaking havoc within it until they too were exasperated with him.
During the war, he was well suited to join in the killing, quickly becoming one of the war’s rising stars. He spent three months in a military training course and returned from it an officer in the Pioneers of the Revolution unit. As a military man, he could do what he liked. He could refuse orders. He could call on anyone he wanted, mobilize people around him. He could also organize big operations: stealing cars and coming away with a diverse fleet; his comrades had a habit of driving these cars wildly and wrecking them, creating excellent parts at low prices afterward. They would also sell furniture from houses they’d pillaged, and extort the rich and influential in exchange for protection.
The war destroyed political parties and organizations; military wings prevailed, as did the logic of war itself. As soon as killing starts, as soon as human life becomes cheap, then everything is allowed. As soon as people acquire the right to annihilate human life, they become lowly gods who consider everything available, and any material possessions as offerings for themselves. They become idiots, using their whole lives to snatch up whatever comes into their hands. They exist only to expand their authority, committing all sorts of transgressions. After the second or third operation they are liberated from any type of self-reflection and start to believe in themselves — of course, most of the time not giving value to anyone else’s opinion. It can’t hold up. From the moment people start to cross lines, thought becomes weak and can’t defend itself. Each individual must build his authority with his own hands, necessitating an increasing number of transgressions.