At home, Rima spoke German with her mother, and at work, at the Mediterranean Bank, she spoke French, and with her friend the doctor, Arabic. She didn’t know how to speak anymore, as if she’d forgotten the three languages she knew, and started giving this strange impression that she was putting spaces between her words. She’d stop talking in the middle of a sentence, as if she were searching for the right word, or she’d forgotten what she wanted to say. Rima, who’d fled from her mysterious relationship with Hassan, found herself trapped in an even more mysterious relationship with Ralph, or Husn, or Ghassan. The young man with the three names appeared to be more than one person. He slipped between her hands, he seemed strange, as if she didn’t know him. Indeed, she didn’t know him. She met him by chance. She’s the one person in this novel who wasn’t living or working in Hamra, or specifically on Maqdisi Street, and the streets branching from it leading to Bliss Street. Rima was living with her mother in Abi Haidar Tower and felt entirely out of place in Beirut. She came back from France in 1976, because she could no longer stand living alone, and took a job in the Mediterranean Bank, so she wouldn’t be without work. She fell in love with Hassan because he was the first one in this strange city who appeared to her to be a man. She didn’t know what it was she saw in him, because there was nothing very special about him. He had a big nose, thick eyebrows, and arms that seemed shorter than most people’s. He was neither short nor tall, fat nor thin, and in spite of all this she fell into a semimagical relationship with him. From the first day they met, and after he’d finished caring for the wounded man, whose name Rima didn’t know, though she’d brought him and others to the hospital because she happened to be standing on the balcony when the bomb landed, and so she ran to the street and found herself in the hospital, the doctor looked at her, sweat dripping from his forehead, and asked her to buy him a cup of coffee. They went to L’Express and from there to his house. She smoked hashish, got drunk, and laughed. Then she started going almost every night, to smoke with the same group. She found out that Hassan had been involved with every one of the young women she saw at his house. At first she wasn’t upset, but then she began to feel that chasm taking form in her chest. When she’d meet with Hassan, she would feel as if she couldn’t breathe; this strange world this doctor had taken her to made her lose all feeling of herself. She’d sit on the couches that were lined up in the living room, smoke and drink, and listen to music, while he sat there, seemingly unconscious, but she couldn’t bear to live without him. She thought of asking him to marry her, but she got his answer before even asking the question. She could hear it in his boisterous laughter and carefree talk. Rima didn’t know a lot about him. He said he was involved in the fighting at the beginning of the war, but then he became disgusted, this place is disgusting, heading for extinction, he’d go to America and never come back.
Rima was afraid. When Ralph came and told her, she didn’t believe him. Then she started throwing up. His eyes bulged and there was a razor-sharp coldness in his voice. He said he’d killed the woman, and he wanted to marry her. “Now I can marry you.”
He followed her to the bathroom, where she stood in front of the sink, vomiting. He embraced her from behind, as though he wanted to make love to her. Everything in her insides flowed over as he held her waist, forcing her toward him. Then he collapsed onto the toilet and sat motionless. She left the bathroom and went into her bedroom, and heard her mother’s voice, in German, asking her what was going on. Then Ralph followed her to her bedroom, sprawled out onto the floor, and fell asleep.
Rima couldn’t believe he’d killed Madame Nuha. He didn’t tell anyone he killed her. He told his father he came home and found her dead. He said he left the house key inside, went out, and shut the door behind him, but he didn’t know anything.
“Let’s call an ambulance,” Gandhi said.
“No, no. She’s already dead,” said Husn.
Gandhi didn’t say a word. He knew it was his son who’d committed the murder, but he didn’t ask. Then Husn went out. He yelled to him, and this time he called him “Husn,” and his son answered. He came back, sat down, and lit a cigarette, but Gandhi didn’t ask him anything. When they broke down the door to his house, after the neighbors began smelling the stench of the rotting corpse, they saw Madame Nuha Aoun with torn clothes, her body bloated, and her three cats around her, also dead. Everything in the house was locked — the doors, the windows, the shutters — and the woman was there on the floor, and the three cats, dead. They took her to the hospital for an autopsy before burying her. No one attended the funeral. The Reverend Amin was there, all alone, muttering prayers and fearing this kind of end. Everyone said Husn was the murderer, but comrade Abu Karim put his mind at ease. He said don’t worry about it, “She has no relatives, and no one’s going to ask about her.” But Rima became fearful of Ralph. He told her not to call him Ralph ever again, that his name was now Ghassan, and she should call him Ghassan, and so she did. When she slept with him, she’d get that sour feeling that gnashed at her insides, precisely the way she felt when she slept with Abu Abd al-Kurdi, the concierge of the building where Hassan lived. She didn’t choose to sleep with him; it had never crossed her mind. She was on her way out from Hassan’s house, going down the dark stairs from the third floor, where he lived. There was no electricity and Rima hadn’t lit a match. As she went down the stairs, in the dark, she felt as though she were swimming in a swamp, with bugs swarming all around her. She saw him, she saw his swaying shadow. He was climbing the stairs carrying a long white candle, his shadow swayed past the stairs, giving the impression he was falling to the ground. He reached out as if to stop her, and Rima bumped into his arm, nearly falling down. He grabbed her by her waist with his outstretched hand and pulled her toward him. Rima didn’t say anything. She remembers that she said no, she said tomorrow, but he didn’t say anything. He rammed her with his head and forced her to the ground. Rima fell on the stairs, and there he took her. He didn’t take off his pants, he entered her with all his clothes on, after lifting her short skirt. Everything happened quickly, and Rima felt that sourness rise to her throat. He got off of her, pants and all, walked away, and left her on the stairs, as though he hadn’t done anything, and continued up the stairs. After that, every time Rima went down the stairs, it seemed as though she were waiting for him, and she actually was. With him she felt free, she felt she could liberate herself from this Hassan whom she visited on a daily basis. Then, when she got to know Ralph, or Ghassan, or Husn, she stopped going to him. She decided to end her story with Abu Abd, and with that silent staircase, where she’d seen herself lonely in Beirut’s long nights. There was a bit of pain and ecstasy exploding within her as she staggered between a feeling of disgust with her body and that feeling of fire sprouting in her eyes. But Husn was different, strange.
Alice told Gandhi she didn’t understand men.
Gandhi was walking alone, with sadness all around him, when he met Alice just as she was about to enter the nightclub.
She told him she didn’t understand men.
He was trying to tell her how disappointed he was with his son. Why wouldn’t he marry Rima and end his relationship with Nuha Aoun?
Alice was trying to talk to him about men. And Gandhi knew too well. When he worked at Salim Abu Ayoun’s restaurant in Beirut, he realized that life was full of secrets. The owner of the restaurant had died and left all the work to his wife. Najat, or Um Hasan, ran everything. It was a small restaurant at the end of Abu Talib Lane. It was there that Gandhi discovered the secret. This was what he told his wife the morning after they were married. He told her women were different. But his wife didn’t complain as Um Hasan always did. Gandhi did everything in the restaurant. He fried potatoes and eggplant, washed dishes, peeled onions and garlic, and slept there. He agreed to work for her because she gave him a place to sleep in a little attic above the restaurant. But he discovered that she only wanted him to sleep there in order to keep an eye on the place. Every night after he finished working, she’d prepare a special meal, take a bottle of arak, climb up to the attic, and tell Gandhi to stay downstairs.