The report was terse, but the gist of it was that an explosive charge had been set off at dawn at a publishing house owned by Adnan al-Sabbagh. It caused enormous damage, but no one was hurt.
I sat down on the closest chair and reread the article, then looked up at Wadia, who was setting out a tray with breakfast on the table.
“Who do you suppose did it?” I asked.
He shrugged his shoulders. “Anyone,” he replied. “You’ve got the Iraqis, the Syrians, the Jordanians, the Shia, the Israelis and the Libyans, etc, etc.”
“Is Adnan linked to a particular faction?”
“It’s hard to say. It’s no longer the case that people have ties to a specific faction. Nowadays everyone has ties to multiple groups in order to avoid surprises.”
“But why did they blow up the publishing house when they knew for certain he wouldn’t be there?”
“Maybe the idea was to punish him or to send him a message,” he said, pouring tea from a colored ceramic teapot.
I contemplated the breakfast tray which presented, in the Lebanese style, an assortment of various types of foods, from boiled eggs to green and black olives, lebneh, jam, and zaatar mixed with olive oil.
“In any case,” he went on, “he’s luckier than Salim al-Lawzi, who was kidnapped by the Syrians. They burned his hands before they killed him.”
“I wonder how he’ll react when he sees what happened to his publishing house.”
“I don’t think he’d dare show his face in Beirut now.”
He dove enthusiastically into the food, and when he saw that I was holding back, he said, “Don’t be upset. Maybe you can contact him in Europe through his wife. She’s the one who oversees the publishing house when he’s away. You can be sure that what just happened won’t have any effect on his work. In fact, it may have helped him get new sources of support. And there are dozens of publishers besides him. Did you bring a copy of the manuscript with you?’’
“Fortunately, yes.”
“Then we’ll make copies of it and show it to a number of publishers.”
“But that will take time.”
“A week at the most.”
“I was hoping to work with Adnan,” I said, giving in. “He has a good reputation.”
“Don’t be naive,” he said. “They’re all the same.”
I ate a little, and examined the rest of the newspaper. Then I volunteered to make the coffee. I wanted to clean up the remains of breakfast, but he insisted that I leave everything as it was, saying, “There’s a woman who comes twice a week to clean. Today’s her day.”
I went to the bedroom, pulled out the thick yellow envelope from my shoulder bag, and brought it to the living room. Wadia had gone into his room, so I followed him there. I found him putting on his clothes. I noticed that his body, which had been slim when he was young, was now layered in fat in several places.
“Maybe we can make some arrangements today?” I asked as I brandished the envelope.
“Is this the manuscript? Today is Saturday. Everyone is heading out for the weekend. We won’t be able to do anything with it before Monday. The only thing we can do now is photocopy it.”
I happened to glance at the side table next to the bed, and noticed a gun on it. He saw where I was looking and laughed, saying, “It’s only for show. I don’t know how to use it.”
He pointed to the window. He had replaced the glass with a sheet of cardboard.
“Can you imagine that two seconds were all that came between me and death? I was standing here, just the way you are now. It occurred to me to make a phone call, so I left the room. At that moment I heard the sound of glass shattering, and of something moving violently in the room and striking the wall. After that, I stumbled onto what was left of a rocket missile.’’
We shared our ride down in the elevator with an elegant Lebanese man in a suit of white silk the same color as the hair on his head, which he had combed with considerable care. He was accompanied by a blonde woman in her fifties wearing tight black pants that ended at her knees, and which were held up by thin suspenders over her shoulders that revealed her chest.
We walked in the opposite direction from the way we had come yesterday, passing a group of armed men under a balcony, over which had been raised the banner of the Mourabitoun. Sitting on the balcony was a tall young man with a vicious-looking face, wearing military fatigues. He had propped his machinegun against the balcony railing, and was engrossed in cleaning a long bandolier of gleaming brass cartridges. Several steps away stood an armored car bearing the emblem of the Deterrent Forces, next to a car rental office. Opposite the armored car — on the other sidewalk — a vendor had set out quantities of cigarettes, liquor, chocolate and condoms on top of cardboard boxes underneath a wooden umbrella.
We made our way through several quiet streets. Sandbags blocked the entrances of the houses, and empty cars lined the sides. Wadia pulled me by the arm far away from the edge of the sidewalk, saying: “Any one of these cars could be booby-trapped and explode without warning.”
We walked down a street crowded with more Deterrent Forces armored cars. Perched on top of them were soldiers wearing steel helmets. The armored cars were standing in front of a building over which one of the flags was raised, and traces of damage appeared on the closed-up shops on the building’s ground-floor level.
We emerged onto a city square, on one side of which stood a military truck. A machinegun was mounted over the driver’s cab, with a bare-headed soldier standing behind it. Behind the truck a locked-up storefront could be seen; above it was a torn sign, where the only remaining word was the Syrian-Lebanese Malhama, derived from the Arabic word lahm, meaning “meat”. And along the stretch of the street we were coming from, the remnants of another sign flapped in the breeze, this one with European letters on which the word “Bar” stood out.
Several military cars passed by us, carrying the emblem of the Palestinian Armed Struggle. We walked in front of a hotel whose façade had been destroyed, and several young men were busy clearing the rubble. Beside it was a shop whose front window was bare of glass, revealing an elegant-looking man surrounded by modern display lamps made of two short, gleaming metal rods with round black ends. The man was collecting shards of glass with a straw broom and piling them up to one side.
We reached my hotel, where I paid the bill for the night before and got my suitcase and passport. We headed out, walking on foot, towards Hamra. Gazing down at us were portraits of Saddam Hussein on a cluster of neighboring buildings, which turned out to house Iraq’s Rafidain Bank. A few steps beyond, the walls were covered with portraits of Hafez al-Assad, Khomeini and Gaddafi. A traffic light blocked our way in front of a building covered with Palestinian flags, along with portraits of Yasser Arafat and martyred victims of battles, hostilities and ambushes.
I was instantly reminded of Cairo’s streets when we reached Hamra. The main thoroughfare, where traffic was one-way, coming from East Beirut and heading toward the sea, was crammed with four lanes of cars slowly moving bumper-to-bumper. The sidewalk was crowded with vendors, pedestrians, movie-theater patrons, and customers of sandwich, shwarma and drink stands.
I noticed there were few women out on the streets, and the distinct difference between how women looked now and how they looked at the beginning of the decade. Gone were the imported chic and glamor that marked the 1960s and the beginning of the ’70s. But the elegant cafés still kept their wide glass-front windows. The luxury shops selling watches, jewelry, silverware and clothing were as crowded as ever.