No, it wasn’t love. Karim hadn’t come back to Beirut because of Hend. Hend was over. Even talking to her had become difficult if not impossible, apart from which his romantic escapades with Ghazala had left no room for the past. Even Muna, whom he’d once told was as tasty as an orange, could find no room for herself in his heart. Admittedly, her shudders, the shivering of her cheeks, and her suppressed sighs had made him want more, but Ghazala’s infidelities and stories had taken him captive, making of him a lover deceived — as it is fit all lovers should be. That was how Nasri had characterized lovers, and he was right, even if Karim had learned that deception was fit for lovers alone only when he was on the verge of forty, when he’d had to swallow two deceptions in one go.
Muna hadn’t liked his comparisons or his talk of love, perhaps because she’d felt his words weren’t addressed to her, were a kind of delirious speech with which he filled the gaps in his soul. When he’d likened her to an orange she’d burst out laughing and said she hated the smell of oranges because it clung to her hands and wouldn’t go away.
“I don’t like that romantic stuff. You only have to talk that way and my mood’s spoiled. I like love without words,” she said.
“So you love me,” he said.
“I’m talking about making love. That’s what the French, being a refined people, call it. They don’t use the word the way you Lebanese do. That makes me cringe.”
“But in French you say baiser too, and it means ‘fuck.’ ”
“Stop!” she said.
Everything here told him, “Stop!” Even the encounter in Tripoli, which he’d wanted to be an occasion to honor the memory of his friend Khaled — the only one who deserved to be called a hero — Radwan had come along and destroyed, reviving the atmosphere of fear and threat that had driven Karim to flee to France.
Karim would go back to France the next day because it had become impossible to remain in Beirut and because, for once at least, he had to confront his fate, not go on fleeing it — his fate of living as a stranger and dying as a stranger. He walked, reciting the two verses that he’d known by heart ever since he’d learned to memorize, because his father had always repeated them:
We walked them as steps written for us
And he for whom steps are written will walk them
And he whose end lies in one land
Will not meet with his death in another.
He stopped beneath the semi-circular balcony and looked at the small white building with its flaking paint and, noticing that the flowerpots had been thrown into the street, felt a sudden fear. The earthenware pots that Salma tended were smashed, the small flowering plants torn. He bent over the star jasmine, Damascus rose, lily, Arabian jasmine, and gardenia; for a second he thought Salma’s balcony must have been hit by a stray shell. Looking up, he could see no sign of damage but the parapet of the balcony was devoid of plants. He climbed the stairs at a run, knocked, panting, on the door, and waited a long while before the woman, cloaked in the darkness of that apartment of closed curtains, opened it.
“What happened to the plants?” he asked her.
She gestured for him to enter. She sat on the edge of the couch, he sat facing her. He asked again what had happened but she didn’t reply. She left him alone in the living room, then returned carrying the coffeepot and two cups. They drank the coffee in silence and when she spoke she seemed to have lost her voice, her words emerging covered in silence — a low sound, whispers, and a kind of rattle.
Darkness and whispers, and a woman sitting on the edge of a couch drinking coffee.
He told her she was right. The war would never end because it was inside them.
She said she hated the war and hated herself. “Everything is wrong through and through, son. What do you want from us here? Go back to your wife and daughters.”
He told her he’d spoken with Nasim and that things were back to normal between him and Hend. She replied that nothing was normal but it was better that way.
She said Hend hadn’t been wrong to tell him the truth of his father’s death because he had to know, but Nasim suffered from the same touch of madness that afflicted Nasri.
“I told her he was a man to be loved because he was a real man, not like the doctor, who was present and not present, kind and unkind. ‘Take care, daughter, you don’t make my mistake. I discovered I loved Nasri only after he died. Take care you don’t kill Nasim too and then regret it, the way I now live with regret.’ ”
She spoke of the doctor in a voice wrapped in cotton wool. Karim, seated opposite her, had to lean forward a little to catch the meanings of her words, but he made no comment. He said only that he believed Hend was innocent of his father’s murder; he wasn’t sure his brother was.
“Neither of you is innocent,” said Salma. Suddenly the woman recovered her voice, which emerged over the whispering. “You and your brother are criminals, but your brother has a good heart and behaves like a man, while you’re something frightening.”
“Me?”
“You know, so why ask? The truth is you killed your father ten years before he died. You turned your back and went and left your father alone with the war.”
“But my brother was here.”
“Your brother was always fighting, he was a champion. But what are you? You’re nothing.”
“I too was …” Karim stopped without finishing his sentence. What difference would it make if he told her who he was and why he’d fled Lebanon? Maybe the woman was right. But why had she thrown the plants off the balcony?
When she told him about the plants, her voice fell low again. He wasn’t sure he’d heard her say what she had, or whether he’d just imagined she’d said that her plants were simply an illusory form of life; like everything else in that city, they gave the impression of living but had no life, which was why it was better to throw them into the street and leave them to rot, like the bodies of so many there.
He left wishing he hadn’t made the visit. He’d been ready for anything, but it had never crossed his mind that Salma would bring an end to the story of his return to Beirut with such a dismal scene — a woman of sixty-five out at night on her balcony, throwing her flowerpots onto the street; the falling flowerpots sounding like shells exploding, but not one of the neighbors daring to stick his head out the window to find out what’s going on. The city, having donned the raiment of fear, had curled up on itself, retreating into a shell of stupor resembling death. Everything in it had been transformed into a silence interspersed with hoarse voices, the symptoms of an endless death agony.
Like one sinking toward his death — such now was Karim Shammas as he bent to lift his suitcase out of the trunk of the black Mercedes taxi that had been taking him to Beirut airport en route back to Montpellier. His watch said five thirty a.m., and the Beirut dawn was tinted with darkness and dust. It had rained the day before. Beirut’s spring had arrived, carried upon the sound of thunder, the thunder blending in turn with the sound of the intermittent shelling that roamed aimlessly around the city.
The man, who had just entered his forty-first year, had found it impossible to sleep. He had sat on the couch in the living room, yawned, and waited for dawn to the rhythm of the thunder and the rain.
He sat there alone in the darkness of his soul and decided to rewrite his story. He poured a glass of whiskey, placed a plate of roasted salted almonds before him, and darkness enveloped him. The electricity was cut, the light of the candle shuddered, turning objects into ghosts, and Karim drank the whiskey without ice, feeling his stomach burn.