“Then he started talking in Arabic, which I’d thought he didn’t know. Suddenly his tongue was loosened: ‘You’re backward,’ he said, ‘like all eastern girls. What do think will happen if you come up to my place? Do you think I’m going to rape you?’
“He turned his back and went through the door to the building and I found myself following him and went up and drank grappa. ‘Where’s your wife?’ I asked him. He said she’d gone to visit the children in Cinisello.
“I asked him where this ‘Cinisello’ was. To tell the truth, I thought he was pulling my leg. In the end I told him it was he who was backward because when he made a move and I didn’t respond, he’d sat down on the couch like he was being punished.”
“And then?”
“Then nothing happened. He got up and saw me home and when he tried to kiss me I gave him my cheek.”
She said the story should have ended there because two weeks later she married Ahmad and they went to Italy for their honeymoon and there she discovered Eduardo hadn’t been pulling her leg her because, as she confirmed, there was a small town close to Milan called Cinisello.
She said three months later she’d gone back to the French press agency and met Eduardo. He’d behaved as though nothing had happened and she’d begun her attempts to seduce him.
“I don’t know what came over me. As soon as he saw me he started talking to me in Arabic and said, ‘How are you, child?’ ”
She said she’d felt slighted and made her decision, “and when a woman decides, it happens the way she wants.”
Karim said her story was silly and meaningless.
“He made a fool of you twice, the first time with the grappa and the second by calling you ‘child.’ But what did you want from him? Just married and starting as a teacher — what, you didn’t love Ahmad?”
“Of course I loved him and I still do, but the war.”
“What’s it got to do with the war?”
“It’s how war is,” she said.
“What happened?”
“It happened just like I told you. When I became convinced it wasn’t serious and that he had to wake up and stop behaving as though he was in love, he went to pieces and started chasing me from place to place.”
“And Ahmad?”
“Ahmad knew but behaved like he didn’t, or like he didn’t want to know.”
“And then?”
“It ended.”
“And me?”
“What about you?”
“Has Ahmad found out anything about our relationship?”
“Of course not. Why, are we having a relationship?” She laughed and threw herself onto the bed.
Muna’s laugh sounded in his ears as he listened to Ahmad Dakiz describing the Solidere redevelopment project. On a table in his office he’d put a model of the project as designed by the architect Henri Eddeh previous to the latter’s services being dispensed with following differences with Hariri. In the model the city resembled a curious mixture of Dhahran, Houston, Paris, and an Italian seaside town. In the sea, a few dozen meters from the World Trade twin towers, was an artificial island fated never to see the light of day because of the presence there of a deep marine trough known to the people of Beirut as Dogs’ Hole.
Dakiz spoke briefly about the project, then led his guest to the computer on which he’d installed a program resembling an electronic game. He turned on the computer and Beirut appeared — weeds and trees sprouting from the cracks in its walls — like a ghost town, or a setting for a war movie in a city anywhere in the world.
Maroun Baghdadi said that in his film Circle of Deceit the German director Volker Schlöndorff had discovered the amazing expressiveness of Beirut in ruins as a setting, but the Lebanese had spoiled it with dozens of movies that had turned it from a storehouse of human savagery into banal visual clichés.
Karim said the scene would do as a setting for the moment of resurrection and the end of the world. He was thinking of the terrifying description presented by Ghazala of the end as her other grandmother had imagined it. Dakiz, however, appeared not to be listening. He was preoccupied with making adjustments to the program before starting the game, which Karim would later describe to his brother as “demolishing the demolished.”
“Behold what I shall wreak!” said Dakiz, and suddenly the buildings began to fall, one after another, each disappearing behind a mass of dust before collapsing, broken up into a heap of stones and sand. The architect took the buildings down systematically, starting with Debbas Square, where the Café Laronda and Cinema Dunya were demolished, then turning to Cinema Metropole, and then burrowing off to the right to demolish the police building formerly called the Little Palace; then he entered Mutanabbi Street, where Karim noticed a neon sign on the second-floor balcony of a building apparently untouched by the war and read on it, in English letters, the name Mareeka. “No, don’t you dare demolish Mareeka’s building!” said Karim. But the architect didn’t give him time to finish what he wanted to say, before, on screen, making the beautiful Ottoman house collapse.
“This is insane!” said Karim. “What kind of person demolishes his own memory?”
“Hang on a second,” said Dakiz, “Cinema Rivoli’s going to come down. Why is the computer doing that, even though I put in enough explosives to bring down a city? That cinema’s like a streetwalker, it blocks the sea. For some reason it doesn’t want to come down.”
“Enough!” said Karim.
“Wadi Abu Jamil.”
“You’re going to knock the Wadi down too?”
“To the ground.”
“And the Tawileh market?”
“The Tawileh market?! What are those silly little markets good for? They’re all in ruins and full of trash. It’s all going. We want to build a modern city — malls, like in Saudi Arabia and Dubai and America.”
“And the memories?”
“Memories! This is a country without a memory. What use is memory? Memories of crap and shit, c’est fini. The architect Adnan said this is the age of architecture by explosion and demolition and I was put in charge, and when Adnan took a look at the plan he almost fainted. He said we ought to have shown it to Rashed, God rest his soul, he would have gone wild with joy.”
Karim gathered from Ahmad Dakiz that the architects Adnan and Rashed had been military functionaries during the war. Adnan had gone on to become a contractor and Solidere had managed to persuade him to work with them, and Rashed had died in the Battle of the Hotels in 1976. Dakiz had fought when he was nineteen with the Communist Action Organization, then left it to join a Maoist organization that viewed the civil war as an opportunity to bring about radical change in Lebanon and the region. And today he oversaw the demolition of whatever the war had failed to demolish.
“This is insanity,” said Karim.
“No, doctor. What you just watched was what’s called an illusion d’optique. Everything’s like that now, everything today is an optical illusion. The whole of Lebanon is no more than an optical illusion! And what do you think we’re doing? We’re doing now what we couldn’t do in the war.”
“But you’re a communist, right?”
“Sure I’m a communist.”