“What if he stays the way he is?”
“I don’t know. This is what confuses me. Perhaps the only solution is that we live apart, and through this I’ll find some kind of space that can make me love him more.”
“My God, I’m lost... You’ve lost me in all these twists and turns!”
“Sorry.”
“For what?”
“That I’ve confused you along with myself... I can’t bear to either separate from him or stay with him.”
“Would you consider separating, at least for a little while?”
“The thought haunts me. I don’t know if he would agree.”
“What do you say we finish this conversation tomorrow?”
Lamia reminded her friend that she’d invited Farid to dinner and needed to get home soon. Hyam turned to her, exploring her face with a piercing look.
“Is this serious with Faird? Are you sure? This quickly? Don’t you want to wait a little?”
“I want change; I can’t keep vacillating... You always criticize me for how my life has stagnated. In the best of times, you look down on my patience on the one hand, and on the other, my impulsivity. Why have you changed your mind all of a sudden?”
“I don’t know, perhaps because I’m preparing for an imminent divorce.”
Lamia opened her locked desk drawer. She kept it locked to ensure that her mother wouldn’t pry. It was funny because the one day she forgot to lock it, she noticed in her mother’s mocking smile that she’d gone through it. Her mother waited more than a year to ask her about the pictures of the man she’d found in the drawer.
She answered, “Salma took these photos when shooting one of her films in school.”
“So why are you in most of them?”
“Because Salma wanted me to be the star.”
“Yes, she’s right, you were so beautiful.”
“Every monkey is a gazelle in its mother’s eyes!”
“So what is it that I’m always hearing about the reasons you haven’t gotten married?”
“And now we’ve gone back to the same old song.”
“But you’re my only daughter... I want to celebrate your wedding with you. All of your girlfriends have married and had children. What’s your story? Fine... That letter signed by your old high school friend, saying, May God keep this bitter drink far from us... What does that mean? What drink? You know... it’s the war’s fault; it meant that I couldn’t protect you. I was forced to stay in the mountains with your siblings. And you lived with your crazy girlfriends. All of the neighbors used to tell me, Umm Joseph, these girls are raising hell in the neighborhood. Your whole life I couldn’t learn anything about you or from you. Sometimes I’d be thinking, Is this my daughter? The one who I gave birth to?... Or not?”
Her mother had stopped asking these questions a long time ago. Clearly, she’d lost hope.
Perhaps the only good thing for her in this war was the freedom of living far from her parents. The constant cutting of the phone lines was a ready-made excuse to justify many things. She, Salma, and Hyam moved from one car to another around Beirut, undeterred by shelling and checkpoints, without any impediments. Salma would deal with falling shells as if they were fake — simply there as a backdrop to allow her to photograph the expanse of the entire city. She didn’t believe it possible that she could be killed or injured. She brooked no fear. If she sensed any fear in you, she would give you a look that would chill the blood in your veins.
Back then, Lamia had grabbed the photos from Philippe, the “hero” of the film — whether cynically or jokingly, it doesn’t matter. As usual, he threw himself on her bed, eyeing her. Then he said to her out of the blue that he never stays with any woman for more than two years. Two years in the best of cases. She didn’t reply.
He did what he said he would. He didn’t stay with her even one month beyond the two years. When she added up the period of time between when they met and their breakup, the precision of his calculations amazed her. Those beams of the setting sun started to dim, carrying her days on their wings. Hyam came over to comfort Lamia and Salma picked up her letters to deliver them to Philippe by hand or send them by post (she learned only afterward that Salma would actually throw them in the trash can). That summer, she didn’t change out of her winter clothes, nor did she change her winter bedclothes. Beirut’s fiery summer heat, with its sun and bombs, couldn’t warm the cold inside of her. Nothing protected her in the barren field that was her bedroom except her dressing gown and her covers. If it weren’t for the war, her winter couldn’t have gone on for so long and she would have enjoyed her love that ended before it even began.
Other forgotten memories surfaced from her “secret” stash of photos. They showed the blondness of Philippe’s stubbly beard, contrasting with his black hair and eyebrows and the shadows of his thick eyelashes. She recalled passing her hand over the freckles on his lower lip slanting down toward the fluff of his beard, the spot she touched stinging her own face. She drew back, and he grabbed her by the hand and threw her on the ground of the cement rooftop. There were stars above her eyes, glittering in a small pool of rainwater. She remembered him sitting on the sofa beside her, snatching pieces of fig from the plate in front of him, peeling them and scraping off the bits stuck on his fingers with his teeth. He seemed far away when he was united with her body (she was aware that after he got up, she’d put the same clothes back on that she’d worn earlier to greet him in, preparing for the moments of their encounter one by one, like someone replaying a scene in a film, and trying as much as possible to simulate his confident, slow caresses sliding from her legs up to her shoulders).
Philippe put his hand on her freezing shoulders. He liked to touch them; that’s what he told her.
“Will you put your hand on my shoulders next autumn, once you’ve gone? Will you feel pleasure when it’s cold?”
He encouraged her not to think about this.
“But why? Does this have to happen? Isn’t it up to us?”
“What do you want me to say? No matter what I say, you are going to be sad... If you’d only met someone else...”
“Could you stop offering condolences? I know I’m the only one here mourning our relationship.”
“Perhaps this misery comes from those dark clouds. Haven’t you noticed how thick they are? How could you expect me to have hope?”
Everything that he said bothered her. She didn’t know what to do when faced with his complaining and infectious despair. In another picture, he was sticking his tongue out at her, a pink tongue folded in thirds.
“What do you want, a happy end?”
She stuck her tongue out at him now. “I just want some kind of end.”
The pizza that she’d insisted on preparing for Philippe that hot spring day had a taste she’d never forget. She was half-sleeping, half-awake, so the ring of the phone surprised her. Even today, she still remembers his number because of the frequency with which she’d dialed it on the old black phone, turning her finger again and again so that it hurt and she had to switch to dialing with a pen instead. Perhaps the broken telephone lines ignited their love rather than impeded it.
She’d promised Philippe that she’d make a pizza for him. She left her house, went down to the street, leaving the Sayyidah neighborhood in Sin el Fil, taking the shortcut to Mar Elias. A small truck was stopped at the intersection, loaded with large cylinders of gas that looked exactly like the one she saw just before the explosion that destroyed most of the neighborhood. Afraid, she glanced away and didn’t head down that street. Before turning on her heels, she looked back once more: a year had passed and the specter of death was still looming over this stricken neighborhood. She took another road, passing in front of the church to reach Ghazal Street. She was crossing the muddy wasteland when shelling started raining down on the area. No doubt it would be described as a new “security setback.” She retraced her path along the sidewalk to her house at full speed.