“So why didn’t you come back and save me?” she said, laughing.
“I was afraid,” he said.
“Afraid for me or for yourself?”
He’d wait for her at the entrance to the cave and then they’d return in one of those canoes that the Lebanese call a “fishbone” and go to the swimming pool at the nearby Sporting Club, where they’d drink orange juice.
Karim wouldn’t speak much. He’d tell her about Danny and his Fedayeen comrades. It was the eve of the war but Hend had no interest in the subject. She thought politics was a way of killing time.
“You’re like men playing cards. You know what they say when they play cards? They say, ‘Come on. Let’s kill some time! You aren’t just going to kill time, you’ll probably end up killing yourselves and everyone around you too.”
Karim hadn’t surrendered in the face of this kind of talk. He believed time would change her mind and that this Hend, salted with sun and sea, would be his life’s companion.
Shaking the water of Rawsheh Rock off herself and lying on a deck chair at the Sporting Club, Hend said that three days before she’d had a terrifying dream which she hadn’t wanted to speak of in case it came true, but then she’d changed her mind and decided to tell him about it because, that day, for the first time, she’d felt afraid of the darkness of the cave.
Hend said it had been a long dream. It had lasted all night, she hadn’t forgotten any of it, and she was scared.
“Dreams are our repressed desires,” said Karim. “Out with it, so we can see what your desires are.”
Karim sat on the edge of the chair, lit an unfiltered Gauloise, took the first drag deep into his lungs, and waited for the story.
“What kind of a cigarette is that that smells so bad?” she asked.
He said the roasted black tobacco was less harmful and gave you a buzz. He didn’t attribute it to Danny’s influence, or mention that French tobacco had become fashionable among the Lebanese leftists following the May ’68 Revolution in France.
“You and I were swimming beneath Rawsheh Rock and as usual I left you and went into the cave. It was dark. I swam. The water was very cold. Then I began to feel it was sticking to my body. I felt cold and was afraid. I tried to get out of the cave. I turned toward the entrance but instead of seeing light it just got darker. Usually when I turn around to go back I see the most beautiful view in the world. The sun looks as though it’s sleeping on the water in the middle of the cave and the light is coming from under the water. ‘Come on,’ I thought, ‘where’s the entrance to the cave?’ I turned again and I couldn’t work out the directions anymore. I kept turning around and around and screaming. I screamed but no one heard my voice. It was as though my voice had disappeared. I knew no one could save me.”
“Where was I?” asked Karim.
“You’d disappeared,” said Hend.
“I was alone and there was no one with me and I screamed, ‘Father!’ I don’t know why it occurred to me to scream for someone I only know from pictures, and instead of my father coming to save me I saw him at home. He was sitting in the living room drinking a glass of whiskey and my mother was coming and going to the kitchen because she was getting lunch. The doorbell rang. My mother told me, ‘Get up, Hend, and open the door.’ I ran toward the door to open it and found it was open and there was a tall man standing in the doorway holding a pistol. As soon as he saw me he shot me and I saw blood coming out of my shoulder but I didn’t fall. I heard my mother screaming that her husband had killed her daughter, and hitting herself on the head screaming that her daughter was dead. I stretched out my hands toward my father and said to him in a low voice, ‘Help me, Father.’ I looked out the window and saw him stretched out on the ground, and the tall man who my mother said was her husband was standing over him. I fell down … and was swimming in the sea and the sky was blue and clear and the sea was as smooth as oil. My father was swimming beside me and when I got to the rock I saw it was sinking. It was listing like a ship and instead of the big rock supporting itself on the small, it knocked it over and the two of them sank together. I saw the rock sinking further and further under the water and started to cry. ‘How are people going to know this is Beirut?’ I said. ‘If the rock’s gone, so is Beirut, and me too, who’s going to want to know me now that I have no name?’ And I felt myself sinking and screamed for my father and everything was dark and I was stuck inside the cave.”
“And then what happened?”
“Then I woke up trembling. I went to the kitchen to drink some water. My mother was sitting on her own in the dark smoking a cigarette. I went up to her to kiss her and noticed her face was wet with tears. She was weeping soundless tears. I wanted to tell her that Rawsheh Rock had sunk but when I saw her in that state I didn’t know what to do. I drank a glass of water and went back to bed.”
Hend said that that day, for the first time in her life, she’d felt frightened of the sea and the cave. They were swimming at the beginning of April ’75; the Beirut spring sun had not yet taken the chill out of the sea air but Hend swam all year round, saying she loved the shock of the cold water, it refreshed and revitalized the heart and stimulated the circulation. Karim didn’t like the cold. He’d tried on innumerable occasions to put Hend off swimming out of season but it was no use.
He’d sat down in the chair and covered himself with the towel, seeking shelter from the cold air that infiltrated via his pores, and listened to the dream that Hend, stretched out on her back in her bikini with her eyes closed, had told.
“What do you think?” she asked.
“What do I know? Really, it’s a strange dream. It doesn’t make sense at all. All I know is that when you dream of the sea it means repressed sexual desire but your dream’s very complicated.”
“Like Meelya’s dreams,” she said. “Dear God, I’m afraid I’ll end up like she did at the end!”
“Who’s Meelya?” asked Karim.
“Her nephews were our neighbors and my mother told me strange stories about her. It’s said her dreams used to come true and everyone was afraid of her.”
“Then what?”
“Then how should I know?”
He said the best way to deal with dreams was to forget them and he was cold and wanted to get dressed.
When the war started he told Danny his girlfriend had prophesied it because she’d dreamed that Rawsheh Rock had sunk, and that that symbol of Beirut created by the French — which they’d put on all the postage stamps as an embodiment of Beirut under their Mandate — had to sink now that the old Lebanon had come to an end.
Danny just smiled the superior smile, which was one of the hallmarks of his mastery over others. He’d listen without interrupting, then pronounce in a single sentence his dismissal of Freudian doctrines that made man the slave of those dark irrational regions that they call the unconscious. It was only in France that Karim discovered that the French had nothing to do with Rawsheh. He’d been in Montpellier with Talal discussing the idea of Maroun Baghdadi’s film when Hend’s dream had flashed through his mind. He told Talal that the film ought to end with the vanishing of Rawsheh Rock and recounted to him the story of the symbol of the Mandate that had to disappear.
“What have the French got to do with it?” asked Talal.
“The French took the name they gave to the area from the rock. “Rock” in French is rocher, from which we got the word Rawsheh and from then on we started saying ‘Rawsheh Rock.’ ”
Talal didn’t smile Danny’s superior smile but he did explain to the Lebanese doctor that this was a common misunderstanding. “The French had nothing to do with it. ‘Rawsheh’ was originally the Syriac word rawsh, meaning ‘head.’ The rock was, according to our ancestors, who spoke Syriac, ‘the head of Beirut,’ but in our ignorance we believed it was a French invention.” The French had called the area La Grotte aux Pigeons, referring to the cave close to the rock. The rock itself was 100 percent Syriac. Talal said his mother had told him the tale because she was an eccentric woman: “You know, she phones from Beirut, with the shells falling around her like rain, and tells me about her linguistic discoveries. She told me the dictionary and the books of Anis Freiha were the best way to forget the war.”