Gone? Was it ever really there? There were a lot of us in the safe room: the residents of entire buildings would go down to that shelter when the shelling intensified. We knew the shriek of the rockets, and we knew which ones could pass through several floors of a building before exploding. Whenever we heard those shrieks in the sky, we’d run to that underground shelter. There were a lot of us down there. I remember the neon light buzzing, and I remember the man wiping the water from his hair and the coat hanging from his hand. I don’t remember his voice, but the words — the traces of his words — still paint a picture in my mind, to this very day. And the others who were with me in the safe room, do they remember? Of course they do — at least some of them. Don’t they? I’d like to know how they remember that incident.
I don’t remember my father in the safe room. I remember Ilya pulling out heavy boxes and spreading things on the ground for my mother to sleep on. I remember a man with his family in the corner (the Taniyus family). He was holding his wife in one arm and his children in the other: all of them were trembling, and whenever they opened their eyes you could see the whites, even in the darkness you could still see the whites of their eyes. A moment came when darkness prevailed and the noise died down, when all you could hear was a prayer or a murmur, and also the snoring of an old woman in the corner of the room — in that darkness, no one could find her to shake her and stop the snoring. There were more than seventy people down there. Do I remember all their names? I used to know everyone in the neighborhood, and sometimes people from outside the neighborhood would come to that safe room as welclass="underline" passersby who were caught off guard by the shelling, who’d rushed to the entrance of the building. There was a long staircase descending underground. I remember the lumps of hardened wax on the stairs, and I remember the colored plastic water bottles at the bottom of the stairs. I remember once, when I was half-asleep between my mother and sister, someone sparked their lighter in the darkness: I saw the light rise, and I saw a woman’s face, round and yellow, her sweaty and disheveled blond hair around her ears — she was looking for a slipper, or something else she’d lost. I remember people swearing and praying, and I remember the crackling of a small transistor radio rounding out the night. I remember the man who looked after that building: he grabbed a cup of tea one day at sunset, went outside to inspect the street for a moment, and never came back.
I don’t remember my father in the safe room. He’d disappear whenever the fighting started up, and sometimes he’d disappear before it started too. He’d only come home to eat or sleep. Mother’s health would improve for short periods, and she’d get out of bed and wander from room to room. When that happened, white sheets would appear on the ground in the sitting room (where we never sat), with rows of delicious date cookies (maamoul) lined upon them. My father always wanted to celebrate whenever mother’s health improved. I remember the first time I heard him say, as he was drinking his morning coffee, “The butcher’s begun the slaughter.” Was it the first time? I remember my sisters’ joyful faces, and I remember my mother laughing and Ilya laughing too. That was an old expression in the family, an expression that meant something, as if it were the secret password to enter a palace they all knew about. It was new to me, though, because I was young, because I was a newcomer, and now I hardly know what it means anymore. My father got dressed and left without taking the car keys, and when he returned, there was a hunk of meat in his hand. I never saw my father in the kitchen except on occasions like those. My sister, Mary, brought him the wooden cutting board we usually used for vegetables and handed him the knife. Julia was there too, standing by the fridge and craning her neck to see. He cut out the raw black liver. He sliced off the fat and cut up the whole slab of meat himself, arranging the pieces on plates. Najwa cleaned the mint and peeled the onions. Julia got out some ice cubes. Ilya wasn’t in the kitchen, he was helping mother set the table. Father was the only one who ever mixed the arrack, he’d mix it once we were all sitting at the table. It was morning, and we never ate meat in the morning — except for meat pastries (manakish) — but that morning we ate meat and drank arrack. He poured glasses for all of us. He even poured one glass for Liliane and me to share: he filled the glass with water and ice and put a single drop of arrack in it. We saw the drop fall into the water, saw the water suddenly turn milky white, then saw the white dissolve until the liquid was clear again — but Liliane said we were drinking arrack. Father clinked glasses with mother, Julia with Mary, Mary with Najwa, Najwa with Ilya. Ilya got up from his chair to lean across the table and clink glasses with mother, laughing. Liliane and I fought over our one glass, and wanted to toast with everyone. My mother prepared a bite for me: a small piece of onion, a fresh mint leaf from the tip of the branch (the “crown” of the mint), a piece of the black liver, and a piece of the lamb’s white fat. She sprinkled some salt and cinnamon on it. I ate the morsel — I knew it was delicious, and I knew I loved it. But Liliane only ate olives. “Look,” they told her, “look, why don’t you eat like your brother?” I gazed at their faces and felt love fill the room, yet I could still make out a strange look in their eyes.
I told you I came down with measles once, and once with smallpox. Your temperature rises when you get sick, and because of the high fever your brain starts turning to mush, your mind starts imagining things. Scientists know this, they say Michelangelo was in that state while he was painting the dome of Saint Peter’s Basilica. We have visions when we’re sick, we see things we can’t usually see. I have a memory from my illness: I’m wandering around the house by myself (I don’t know where anyone else is — maybe they’re at the school? maybe they’ve gone to the neighbors’ house? maybe they’re sleeping?), I’m wandering alone among the rooms, looking at the vase on the table, at the tin can on the dresser that Mary puts cookies in, at the clothes that Mary left on the bed, at the rocking chair where Ilya likes to sit when his friends visit; at the plastic covering the window that overlooks sandbags and a dry tree, at the cracked paint on the walls, at the spots where the paint hasn’t cracked yet…. I’m alone in the house, wandering among the rooms as if walking on clouds. I see a doll on the ground and think about picking it up: I imagine myself bending over, but I don’t actually do it because I’m tired and my head is heavy and the heaviness is gathering itself together into beads of sweat on my forehead, and so I continue walking as if something dark were calling me. (Many years later, while my mother was breathing her last on the bed in her room, my father came rushing home: he’d felt mother calling him.)
This is the memory: my cotton pajamas are drenched, they’re clinging to my sick body while I, as if in a dream, walk to the living room and come to a halt in front of my dead brother’s picture. I raise my eyes and stare into his face, considering the features of the face that looks like my own, focusing all the strength in my small head and trying to remember him while he was here, here in this living room where I’m standing, before they kidnapped and killed him.
3
WHO LIVES behind the demarcation line, in West Beirut? The English teacher answered our question in English: “Beasts and monsters,” he said. I went with Antoine Tannouri — my best friend at the Sacred Hearts School — to the Violet Bookstore by the Hôtel Alexandre and got an English-Arabic dictionary to look up the two words. Who lives behind the demarcation line? Beasts and monsters. Killers and ghosts. Animals and demons. Antoine studied with me at the Nazareth School as well, but we weren’t in the same section there, and we didn’t stay friends. I switched to a new school and, coincidentally, he switched too, and we struck up our friendship again. We used to call Antoine “Bugs Bunny” because of his long ears, and he used to call me an ass and say he wasn’t a rabbit, and then let out that loud laugh of his. He was constantly making fun of himself, and he was quick-witted — whenever he made fun of one of the teachers he always had us doubling over in laughter. He had a sharp mind and always got the highest grades, even though we never saw him study. He wore glasses with a frame made of black bone. His shirts were ironed, and smelled of soap.