I remember the day when we decided to move to a safer place. We were in Intisar’s room and neither of them — that is to say, Intisar and Malek — were home. I was naked and Georges was kneeling, kissing every part of my body, his hand gently stroking my breasts. Suddenly we heard the door open. It was Intisar’s sister, who lived with her, coming home from school. We used to remember that first time we met her and laugh about it together.
We ate dinner at the house of a Danish woman who also worked as a hospital volunteer in the Shatila camp. After dinner there once I took off my shoes and left them in the middle of the room near the leg of the dining table. At the end of the night, Georges had to drive me home because the wine had made my head heavy. I asked him to help me get to the car and don’t remember what happened on the way. No doubt I fell asleep, since I do remember how he gently stroked my face and shoulders to wake me up, saying, “Myriam, Myriam, come on, we’re there.” When I didn’t answer, he asked jokingly, “Will you sleep at my place?” When I still didn’t answer, he said, openly and naughtily, “Will you sleep with me?”
I woke up with all my faculties at that moment as though a bell had suddenly rung inside my head. When I got out of the car he slipped a piece of paper with his phone number on it into my hand, saying, “We’ve known each other for a while and we don’t call each other. I won’t call you first, even though I really want to see you again. I’ll leave it to you to take the initiative.” I was sleepy but awake enough to hear him and like what he said. I liked how simply he said what he wanted.
The next time we met, he told me how my shoes had excited his imagination and a thousand poems that night! He said this laughingly, then stopped and added as though he were reading from a book, “Just seeing one of your shoes upside down turned my whole life upside down, from top to toe!” Rarely did we meet without recalling the memory of that evening. While kissing my body, he’d repeat, “I only had to see one of your shoes, left carelessly on the bare tiles near the table, to imagine you in bed, naked. This was enough to make me desire you, to be aroused and imagine your naked legs clenched around my waist while I’m on top of you.”
I started to believe that Georges couldn’t have sex without recalling that story. He brought fruit into bed before making love, fed me grapes, kissed me and put his tongue in my mouth to share the fruit. Sometimes, when in bed, I felt we were playing, like children, and that our bodies were finding their way to a pleasure without sin.
Before I left for Australia, we made love early in the morning. This was the most pleasurable time for him.
Relaxed and contented, I whispered to him after we’d finished making love: “I forgive you all your past sins and those which you have not yet committed, from now until five hundred years into the future.”
He answered with a laugh, “Yes, yes, my Goddess, my Lord-ess.” I used my damp hand to wipe the juices of our lovemaking from between my legs, and told him, “This is the holy water, take it as a baptism.” I rubbed my hand on his face and forehead. I told him that rituals, no matter what religion you were raised in, are pure sex. For me, the best moments to make love are during prayer times, since there’s so much Sufi ritual in lovemaking.
Georges found my comparison between making love and Sufism strange, and answered with a devilishness that I love, “There are too many holy prayers and rituals… one man alone cannot carry out all your wishes.” I said sarcastically, “Yes, there are more than you think, especially if you gather up all the sects in the world and add up all of their required prayers and rituals. For us here in Lebanon, my dear, this won’t be easy — it’s almost too many to calculate!”
“Luckily, your rituals can be completed without speaking aloud!” he replied, still laughing.
“You’re evil and shameless!” I answered, throwing myself on top of him.
The war kidnapped Georges. His family is still waiting for him to come back. He’s neither alive nor dead. He’s between two places, suspended between war and peace, the past and the present. I remember the day we met in our apartment near the Arab University and I told him that the test I’d taken confirmed I was pregnant and that the doctor had advised me to have an abortion because I was still unmarried and was, as he put it, “a good girl, from a good family, not a slut.”
I wanted to shout in the doctor’s face but instead I closed my eyes and waited for him to finish what he was saying. Then I removed his hand from my naked belly, got down off the examination table, put on my underwear, and hurried out. After I aborted the baby, I didn’t see Georges much for a while. I was angry at him, at myself, at everything. But our separation didn’t last long.
After the fall of Tell al-Zaatar, Georges didn’t go back very often to the East Beirut neighborhood where he used to live. They knew his face there. He started to be afraid, though his fear didn’t prevent his kidnappers from disappearing him. No one knows how he disappeared and when. People say many things… that he was kidnapped in West Beirut, more specifically near our apartment by the Arab University, that he was kidnapped off a boat headed from Beirut to Larnaca, or perhaps just minutes before he was to board the boat.
I have to leave Nour before five in the afternoon. Intisar is waiting for me at the Rawda café. I gently extract my body from his arms. At that moment, I feel like someone returning a stolen love to its rightful owners.
I leave to go meet Intisar and decide to walk between Ras al-Nabaa and Raouche, trying to find my way with considerable difficulty between the forest of cars parked on the sidewalk.
When I arrive at the Rawda café, Intisar is waiting for me there with Malek. I haven’t seen them in fifteen years. How much Intisar’s changed — her face seems rounder but paler and faded. Her body is thicker and slower moving, but the sparkle in her eyes and her nervous laughter remain a registered trademark of their owner. She hugs me with a shout, “Meemoo, my love!” She always called me that when we were at university. “My God, how much I’ve missed you!” she carries on, her voice as loud as an explosion. I feel the people around us becoming a big circle that encloses us. Intisar wanted to surprise me and has invited all of our old friends. Laughter and questions and kisses and tears. A hug then an abbreviated life story, still suspended powerfully in memory. Immediately after I left Beirut, I had exchanged letters with some of the people here today, but when I moved from Australia to Kenya our communications were cut off. So many of my friends, both men and women, whom I haven’t seen for so long are all here together. I can’t believe that Intisar gathered this many people to welcome me back. I feel as though I’m lost among them and don’t know what to say. “The thing they remember the most are the love letters that we sent to that sociology professor at the university, my God, those days… we were happy despite the war,” Rima says while we’re hugging each other and laughing. “We were naughty!” I tell her. Jokingly she asks me, “Are you still?”
We’d drawn pictures in red pen of hearts and kisses, addressed the envelope to the sociology professor, with his office number in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, and put it into the university’s internal mail.
In the Rawda café I meet most of my friends, those friends, friends who have changed. Moments of silence pass between us and nothing can change this, except stories from the past, stories of a time we shared. I have to concentrate hard when they talk about politics, especially local politics. I concentrate so that I can follow the thread as they’re talking to me. But I still don’t understand everything.
Intisar says, “In this country you’ll find different groups. There are people who talk about the war like it happened in another country. Like they’ve forgotten everything. The past has become a story you read about in a book. There are some who’ve forgotten how people stood on their balconies applauding for young militia men while they dragged an unarmed man along the ground because he happened to be from a different sect. Some man they kidnapped at a flying roadblock or a checkpoint. Of course they say that the war’s over, but perhaps nothing is over. There’s a place for everyone: for the person who wants to forget and the person who wants to remember. What’s important is to know where you want to position yourself.” Intisar says all this while looking at my face, wide-eyed. It’s as though she’s pointing her finger at me, accusing me of committing a crime, though I don’t know what. Maybe it’s the crime of having a memory, especially the memory of those who left the country during the war. It’s as if someone who emigrated has no right to remember — to remember violence, to remember the war. The war’s not over, I say to myself, while Intisar continues, as though delivering a speech prepared in advance. Stories about the war go nowhere but backward; they return to the same place they started from and then sometimes flare up, taking on a more violent form.