They were sitting in front of the store discussing the end of the war. Little Gandhi was standing there, not because he preferred to stand, but because he didn’t know what he should do or say. He didn’t sit down, he remained standing, listening to their chatter. The Assyrian talked about the cat food that went off the market during the long blockade, and Ms. Najat talked about the benefits of iodine from seawater, and Gandhi tried to understand why they were happy. He saw their faces elongate. The radio announced the bombing in Ashrafiyyeh and people began racing to their houses. Their faces became long, like masks. The masks ran in the city streets, and the streets became empty. Even the sound of people’s footsteps was no longer heard. The storekeeper locked up his shop, Najat ran to her house, and Gandhi found himself walking along the city streets, not knowing where he was going. He understood this time that the war was not over. When he saw his son crying in the streets three weeks earlier, he thought the war was over. “The war is over,” Gandhi had shouted, holding his son’s shoulders as he took him home. His son’s crying was a declaration of the end of the war. The Palestinian freedom fighters went to the sea, and the Israeli army was at the gates of Beirut.
“It’s all over,” his son said. “Before you know it, the tall American will be back, everything will come back, and we’ll go back to the way we were.”
Gandhi told his wife that night, after he’d fed his daughter Suad by forcing her to open her mouth and threatening to hit her while she ran away and held onto the walls and finally accepted, sitting like a chicken in front of him. He fed her as if he were stuffing her. She climbed onto the mattress on the floor and fell asleep. That day Gandhi told his wife that everything had gone back to the way it used to be, that his son the barber could go and start his life anew.
That day, the war became masks on people’s faces. People became masks without eyes, walking like zombies through the city streets. Little Gandhi was walking. He didn’t go to his house. Did he know he was going to die? And that he was taking his final walk? Is it true that people who are going to die smell death before it comes, and so they go toward it? Did Gandhi walk into his final good-bye when he stopped in front of the bar? He hesitated a long time before going in to find Alice in her usual place, standing beneath the dim red light, holding three red flowers. He didn’t ask her where she disappeared to during the blockade. He himself didn’t know anymore where he’d been, and he didn’t remember anything from the days of the siege, except that he forgot everything. He forgot about people, and work. His wife told him he’d started going senile because he kept forgetting everyone’s names. He didn’t ask Alice anything. He came in and sat down behind the table in front of her. She served him a glass of brandy and he drank it down in one gulp. She laid her hand on his right hand, which he’d rested limply on the table, and started talking. Alice talked a lot. That’s what Gandhi would’ve said if he’d told me the story himself. He’d have sighed about her talking too much and sat quietly. As for myself, my situation is different, since if it weren’t for Alice and her talkativeness, I wouldn’t have found out anything. But why did Gandhi tell her all those stories? Did he really tell her, or did she make them up and tell them as if they were true? She said she ran away from the Blow Up nightclub the day of the incident with Kamal al-Askary and Asad Awwad. You wouldn’t know. She knew. She said the war began at the Blow Up, and for what reason? No reason. “My heart bleeds for them, they killed them, they killed the men and left the thugs.” The day she fled, she met Little Gandhi, and he’s the one who found her a job at the Montana on Hamra Street, next to the Burj al-Salam building.
If Kamal al-Askary hadn’t died, then Alice wouldn’t have met up with Gandhi, and if she hadn’t met Gandhi, then he wouldn’t have told her his story. And if Gandhi hadn’t died, Alice wouldn’t have told me the story. And if Alice hadn’t disappeared, or died, then I wouldn’t be writing what I’m writing now.
Alice held his right hand and tried to raise it up to her lips. Little Gandhi pulled his hand away. “Death is coming. Death is like salt.”
“What kind of talk is this? Get up and go home to your wife and children.”
“I know. I smell death,” he said and got up.
She didn’t ask him where he was going. She let him go and die. She knew, she said to me, she knew he was going to die. “He was afraid of death, and so he went to it, and died,” Alice said to me, while the owner of the Salonica Hotel sat in front of us, his eyes roaming aimlessly about.
The man went home and tried to sleep. No one knew what he thought about that long night. Was he worried about his son Husn because he hadn’t come home, or did he see his life pass before his eyes like a movie, as novelists say? What we do know is that he woke up early, feeling as if he hadn’t slept at all. That’s what Rima said he said. The roar of the airplanes rang in his ears. He made a cup of coffee, sweet, the way he liked it, and heard a faint knock at the door. His wife was asleep, and his daughter was tossing and turning in her bed as though she were awake. He opened the door and there was Rima, standing with her curly blond hair tied up on top of her head like a hat, hesitating to enter. She asked for Ralph, and when he told her he wasn’t home, she wanted to leave. Gandhi invited her in for a cup of coffee, and told her his son hadn’t slept at home, maybe he’d spent the night at the barber shop. It was as though she weren’t hearing. She grumbled about the coffee being too sweet and then asked about the news. “The Jews are in Beirut,” Gandhi said. “And Bashir Jumayyil is dead.”
“Dead,” she said in a soft voice and broke into tears. Everything in her cried. Gandhi wasn’t sure, was she crying about the Jews, or because she was sad about the president’s death? The way she cried was very strange. Her whole body shook, the cup of coffee slipped from her hands as she swayed as though she were dancing. She put the cup on the table and left quickly, her torso bent forward and her curly hair bouncing like a conglomeration of scattered blond strands on top of her head. Gandhi didn’t try to stop her. He let her go and thought about his fate. He turned on the transistor radio and listened to the news of the Israelis entering Beirut. The sounds of explosions started. He didn’t think about his son Husn, or his daughter sprawled on the floor, or about anyone. He thought about the shoe-shine box. He got up and hurried to the box, which had been thrown carelessly to the corner of the room, and began to clean it.
Gandhi was constantly thinking about Alice. Ever since that meeting, he’d felt as though he were personally responsible for her. Alice was strong enough. From the moment Gandhi took her to the Montana on Hamra Street, she’d been very independent. It’s true that Hasan Zaylaa was the one who set up the whole thing, but Alice was able to adjust and ended up selling flowers in the bar. The clientele had changed; soldiers and groups of armed men came to the bar and swallowed their drinks as though they were drinking castor oil. Gone were the days of customers who sat and sipped their drinks, telling their stories and listening to stories about girls. Alice didn’t like this new atmosphere, but she accepted it, and she managed to find some customers for her flowers and make a living for herself.
After two years of aimless hanging around because the Blow Up had shut down, Little Gandhi set her up at this bar, through the help of Zaylaa. Zaylaa was a story in himself. After he killed his oldest sister and tried to commit suicide, he joined one of the civil war organizations, and he migrated through all of the various organizations, ending up in charge of the bar department.