In 1982, a couple of months after the infernal Israelis blew up the dealership during an aerial bombardment, and after their siege of Beirut, I went home for Christmas. The city was mired in civil war and occupied by Israeli troops, but that didn’t stop my mother from asking me to take four-year-old Salwa for a walk while she got a manicure and pedicure. A week of calm had inspired courage in the city’s denizens, but not in me. Whether that was because courage was never my forte or because I was no longer a denizen of Beirut, I couldn’t tell. A few months earlier, the Israelis had bombed the city incessantly. A few months earlier, the Syrians had assassinated the Lebanese president. A few months before that, the militias had massacred thousands of Palestinian civilians in the camps. Today, my mother wanted a manicure.
“At least the PLO is gone,” she said. “It’s safer now, in principle.” The Israeli invasion had incapacitated her for quite some time, but recently she’d been reclaiming her normal life.
It wasn’t as if my mother were the only crazy one. The Lebanese took advantage of every lull. The blare of car horns as I pushed Salwa’s stroller along was deafening. Military jeeps drove by and honked their way past civilian automobiles. The Corniche was filled with promenaders.
I stood in front of the building where my mother was having her nails done. She was somewhere on the second floor. The manicurist usually came to the apartment, but today my mother had wanted an excuse to go out. I considered pushing the stroller across the boulevard to the Corniche, but I felt paralyzed. The people enjoying their walks didn’t inspire any confidence in me. I felt safer standing close to the building, and my napping niece didn’t seem to mind.
In the midst of my passive panic attack, I heard a hissing sound coming from behind the war-damaged green wall separating the building from its neighbor: “Psst, psst.” I began to back away slowly, pulling the stroller. My blood was rushing so fast I almost blacked out. I was twenty-one, too young to die, much too young. “Over here,” the voice behind the wall said, quietly and urgently. I couldn’t tell who was stupider: the man who was hiding and expecting someone to respond to his call, or me for not running into the building screaming my terror out. “Osama,” the man called. A bearded face appeared from behind the wall. “It’s me, Elie.”
I barely recognized my brother-in-law, although he had the same features, the same nose and mouth and brow. It wasn’t the beard or the gauntness that made him unrecognizable and disturbing. It was the eyes, brimming with the brilliance of insanity. Elie’s most distinctive feature had been his swagger, but he wasn’t able to exhibit any as a disconnected head.
“Hey. You look different.” I backed up another step. “I can’t stay, because I have to take Salwa inside.”
“No, wait,” he pleaded. He didn’t move from behind the wall. Only his angled head with its crown of untrimmed hair showed. “I can’t stay, either — too many traitors around — but I want to talk to you. I saw you from two buildings away and ducked over here; it’s too dangerous. We must meet at a secure location.”
“A secure location?”
“Where no one will kill me. Meet me at Trader Vic’s tonight at eight. I have many things to tell you. Don’t stand me up, I beg you. Promise me.” He withdrew his head without waiting for my agreement. I looked around, wondered why the air didn’t feel different, why there wasn’t some form of proof that Elie had been there. Salwa stirred in the pram. I checked, but she was still napping. Elie hadn’t even asked who she was.
The dank fog of smoke forced what dim light there was to scatter randomly. Elie was sitting on a high stool at the bar, and seemed about to tip over. The bartender, a bald, muscular man in a colored polyester shirt, leaned across the bar surface and whispered something into Elie’s ear. When the bartender pulled his head back, I could see that he wasn’t exactly sober, either. The room groaned and sweated, feverish amid an infestation of bamboo. I shuddered. The bartender noticed me and arched his eyebrows. I sat next to Elie and ordered a beer.
Elie discovered my existence when the bartender placed the bottle in front of me. “My mother won’t talk to me anymore,” he said.
He exhaled a dragon’s worth of smoke. I wiped the irritation from my eyes and took a sip of beer. “How are you doing?” I asked.
“My mother won’t talk to me,” he repeated. “I’ve been trying to get in touch, but she won’t even open the door. I might get murdered any minute and she doesn’t care.”
I felt as if I were stuck in a portentous Godard movie. “Tell him why,” the bartender said as he cleaned glasses with a dingy towel. He looked like a wrestler flexing before a match.
“I threw an ashtray at her.”
“And he’s surprised she doesn’t talk to him,” said the bartender.
“I didn’t hit her, did I? I threw the glass ashtray at the door to get her to move. She didn’t want me to leave. She argued and argued and then threw herself in front of the door, as if that was going to stop me. She can’t tell me what to do.”
Not a Godard movie, a Hollywood B-movie. An abrasive Don Ho was actually singing in the background. “She can’t tell you what to do,” said the bartender, “and now she won’t talk to you. You can’t have it both ways.”
“Hey,” called Elie, “whose side are you on?”
“Your mother’s. I’m always on a mother’s side. She raised you better than this. And you know she’d do anything for you. Tell him.” The bartender jerked his head toward me and flicked his towel at Elie, who turned his back and almost fell off the stool.
The bartender sighed and told me the story himself. When the Israelis laid siege to Beirut, the Palestinians and the Lebanese leftist militias hunkered in for the last stand. The city was shelled by battleships in the west, tanks and rocket launchers from the mountains in the east, north, and south, and jets from above. Elie didn’t return home for two weeks, remaining in the bunker and dozing whenever he could on the beach, where he was launching ineffective rockets at Israeli gunboats. For a fortnight, his mother, the concierge’s wife, worried to the point where she pricked her arms with darning needles in order not to think of her son. Finally, after midnight on a night of heavy shelling, she left her house and walked the two miles to the bunker. Her son was sleeping on a raffia mat, shoeless but fully clothed under a single blanket.
He opened his eyes and saw his mother glaring at him. “I only wanted to make sure you’re all right,” she said, turning around to go home.
Elie’s gaze was fastened on the label of his beer bottle, which he was systematically tearing to shreds. “It’s the Christians,” he said out of nowhere. “They betrayed us all.”
I wished he would look at me when he talked, but, then again, it was probably just as well that he didn’t. “But you’re Christian,” I said.