On the way back, Olga can’t stop talking. It’s like she wants to erase all trace of this visit. “The war is over… It’s over!” Olga sings, theatrically stretching her arms out of the window of Nour’s car, waving her hands outside. “Look at the streets, look at the traffic… All the hotel rooms are booked up!” I don’t know at that moment where Olga really is. Is she joking? Or is she making fun of the television channels that rejoice all day long that the war’s ended, even though still today men are missing and no one dares ask questions about them. I know that Olga is lying to herself and to us — that she doesn’t believe what she’s saying at all.
“We’re not going to be afraid anymore, the war’s over,” she continues, pointing out that they took away all the sandbags used at checkpoints — there’s only one pile of sandbags left on the Jounieh Highway, near the Nahr al-Kalb Tunnel, and they say that they’ll “cleanse” the area soon. Yesterday, they “cleansed” the “Lebanese Forces” areas and arrested a number of them, I say to myself silently. Before this, a Phalange Party figure disappeared, and they said that the Syrian secret service apparatus had disappeared him. After that another man and another and all of this is happening in a time of peace. “The war is over,” I repeat what Olga said soundlessly. I look at her reproachfully, because she doesn’t want to see the truth, above all she wants to believe the lies she’s repeating. I motion to her to be quiet. Olga quiets down but her words bring me back to a past I want to forget. So why do I blame Olga? I too want to remember the past without pain.
Beirut is heavy with pain. But perhaps Olga is right, what use is memory? A wave from inside the sea should rise up and cleanse everything, wash away tales from the past… its stories, hatreds and resentment. For a moment I live the war as it was then, all that I lived through more than fifteen years before. As though it has been asleep in my body and needs only a little push to reawaken and float up to the surface of my memory. But I want to start over, to open my eyes one morning and see a sun that doesn’t remind me of any yesterday or any war.
I return empty-handed to Beirut, where my loss began. That loss is all I have now.
At a certain moment, near the museum, suddenly I ask Nour to stop the car. Many workers, rebuilding, renovations. I recall that this is where I was stopped at the checkpoint. Here! Yes, here! This is where I was stopped at a checkpoint before I left Lebanon. “Get out, you!” he yelled, pointing his machine gun at me. He was the one who stormed the supermarket and took the cartons of children’s milk right off the shelves and even out of pregnant women’s shopping carts. “Isn’t that him, Olga?” I ask her, pointing out the car window. “Look at him, wearing a shirt and tie and putting something on his belt, what is it? A gun?” “No, it’s not a gun, it’s a mobile phone,” Olga replies. “Isn’t he the same one who stopped a woman crossing the checkpoint between the museum and Barbir and took three bottles of water she was carrying with her to the West side during the Israeli siege and bombardment of West Beirut, when its water was cut off?
“You sent me stories in the papers, news and pictures… everything. What’s happening? Have you forgotten?” I ask her, trying to blink back the tears in my eyes, “Yes, I’ve forgotten…” Olga replies, seeming bewildered.
“I didn’t forget, I didn’t forget,” I repeat, while Nour just seems afraid of something he can’t express. He looks at me and strokes my thigh with the palm of his hand as though he understands what I’m saying.
Olga jumps up from the backseat and holds onto my shoulders impatiently to quiet me down as though I were crazy and raving, “Enough, shut up! You weren’t here, I was. I lived the war and I have the right to forget. Three-quarters of the people who keep talking about memory weren’t here and didn’t see anything… Enough already! We want to forget. Let the people who want to forget, forget. It isn’t a crime to forget!” She says this while holding my shoulders tight as if she were afraid for me because of my words. Perhaps she’s afraid for herself. She lifts one of her hands from my shoulder and touches my face as though asking me to turn toward her because what she’s saying is very important and I need to hear it.
She calms down a little, aware that what she said was hard for me to hear, “There’s no point to all this talk. Come on, let’s sing Asmahan, you still like her, I know you do!” I tell her that I haven’t listened to Asmahan since arriving in Beirut, I left her back in my house in Mombasa. Right then, it’s hard for me to remember any of her songs, as if I’ve completely erased her from my mind. Olga brings her face right up near my hair, puts an arm around my shoulders and whispers, “Of course you aren’t hearing her voice!” She regains her loud voice and rebukes me, “Is there anything else in your head to think about besides the war?” I look at her and think that it’s her right to scold me. I’m the one who enjoys good health, and she knows deep down that her health won’t allow her to live through another war or the peace to come after that war. But she fights desperately to defend a meek, sham peace.
Saying that the war is over is like saying that her health is stable — they are two lies that help her to survive.
Although the war has ended, we still hold on to so much hatred in order to live together. To live in peace. So much hatred for families to continue, for children to grow, for cities to rise and for countries to be built. We need so much hatred just to go on, and when we die no one will know us.
They say the war is over!
I’ll never find a place in the world where thoughts and words are as deceptive as they are in Beirut. But despite all this, I find myself implicated here.
I remember what a journalist friend of Nour’s said to me when I met him a few days ago, “In Beirut, everything begins as a drama and transforms into a caricature.” Easy for a journalist to say, I think, and ask him, “Is everything happening now a caricature, then?”
I start repeating what Olga is saying aloud, as though they’re my own words. The war’s over, we won’t be afraid anymore, they took away all the checkpoints, there’s only one sandbag left on the Nahr al-Kalb Highway. They say that they’ll “cleanse” the area soon. I think about what Olga says and what the journalist says. I tell myself that in any case, I won’t use this road much while I’m in Beirut. Perhaps I’ll take it on one more visit to Georges’ family before I head back to Kenya. But will I return to Kenya, to my house back in Mombasa?
If only Georges had listened to me the day I left. If only he’d paid attention. If he’d agreed to travel with me… perhaps he’d still be here now, perhaps he’d have saved himself from being disappeared or murdered or tortured. Perhaps he’d have saved me from a long journey of waiting and a marriage I didn’t want from the very beginning. From years of doubt and waiting between Australia and Kenya. I wonder why I insisted that Nour accompany me on my trip today. Why did I ask him to come with me to visit Georges’ family? Is it because I want to bury the past with this visit or because I want Nour to share the past with me?
I met Georges at university but our friendship was only born when we were working alongside Palestinians in the Fatah Party. He used to drive every day from his house in Sinn al-Fil to my house in Zuqaq al-Blat, and give me a ride to Shatila where we worked as hospital volunteers. This was when the crossings between the two Beiruts were still open. Later we met as lovers. We met then at Intisar and Malek’s house and after that in an apartment that Georges rented for us in the Arab University area near the hospital.