Muhammad Abi Samra - Beirut Noir

She finished her beer and went over to the bar to order a whiskey. This time, when she looked at the hunchbacked man sitting at the bar, she felt that his face was familiar, but she wasn’t really able to tell if she actually knew him. He smiled at her and that’s when she was sure she’d seen him before, but somewhere other than at Abu Wadih’s bar. It was hard to forget a person who looked so peculiar: two small round eyes that she couldn’t read any clear expression in — she saw in them right away familiarity mixed with a bit of dullness, which seemed somewhat deliberate, perhaps seeking out the kindness of others or concealing something else — a strangely deformed nose, and teeth that were no less curvy. In short, it was as though a hurricane had struck his face. Despite this, it was difficult to describe him as ugly ... not because he was handsome, but because he was so completely out of the ordinary, as if he were created by a powerful and turbulent imagination. She smiled at him guardedly as she went back to her seat, but he turned around and seemed to stare at her. She concentrated her gaze on the wall in front of her in order to ignore him.

She looked at the large clock hanging on the wall behind the bar; it had just turned nine o’clock and the bar was starting to fill up as usual with new arrivals. She had never bought a watch in her whole life and all the watches that people had given her over the years in their lame attempts to force her to commit to her appointments with them were useless. The strange thing was that the watches themselves would sometimes stop working on their own once she put them on her wrist. She always rationalized this as time itself refusing to be known by her. Surely that was the sole logical explanation for this strange phenomenon.

She was about to light a cigarette when she saw Walid walking toward her. This surprised her because they hadn’t talked in a long while, other than saying hello in passing from time to time. Walid approached her and smiled slowly as he always did.

Walid: Hey there, how’re you?

Maya: Good, you?

Walid: I’m gonna order a drink and come back. What do you want, your usual whiskey?

Maya: I haven’t finished my first one yet.

He didn’t respond and went toward the bar. She thought it strange that he would say your usual, as though three years hadn’t passed since they’d been together. She remembered one time she was here with Khalid, and Walid was sitting at the table across from them with his English girlfriend. Though she hadn’t even said hi to him, Khalid asked her right away if they’d had a relationship in the past. She was weirded out how Khalid could have surmised that on his own. He told her that he knew immediately from the way Walid had looked at her.

Maya: What do you mean, how he looks at me?

Khalid: He looks at you like you’re his.

Maya: But so much time has passed and now he has a partner, I don’t think he even remembers—

Khalid: That doesn’t matter. You don’t know how men think. You know... if a man has seen a woman naked once, every time he sees her he imagines her like that. That’s it... the picture never leaves his head.

At the time she puzzled over whether all men were really like that, or if it was just Khalid’s jealousy that pushed him to these kinds of fantasies, even though he always said that her previous relationships with other men in no way bothered him. And it seemed clear at that moment that he didn’t really accept the idea that a man other than him could ever have seen her naked. But perhaps she was also wrong... He’d proven to her many times that he’d been able to understand her previous lovers better than she could.

Walid handed her another whiskey and sat across from her at the table.

Walid: So it seems you’re alone?

Maya: Yeah, you too.

She resorted to that inexplicable sarcasm she took refuge in when she couldn’t find what she wanted to say. They both laughed together for no clear reason. After this, she understood that Walid’s girlfriend had gone to England and he was getting ready to follow her there. Walid hadn’t really had a deep impact on her life and she didn’t remember suffering all that much when they broke up... his entering and then leaving her life happened with a strange calm. She wished that things could go like that with Khalid too.

Suddenly she found herself grateful to Walid for not staying too long in her life. Their relationship had not lasted more than two months when it ended with a stupid misunderstanding that neither one of them could be bothered to fix. Those relationships that finish before they’ve really started feel painful in the moment, like an abortion. But with time it becomes clear that this is the only kind of relationship that can preserve its beauty, like a movie star who commits suicide at the height of her brilliance. Despite the fact that it doesn’t mean a lot to us, it’s the only thing we can remember without real pain, as if it isn’t really ours, but stolen from someone else’s memory.

She remembered Khalid’s words... is Walid imagining her naked right now? This thought amused her, but in any case, even if he were not visualizing her naked at that very moment, from the way he was talking, it seemed clear that he was determined to see her that way again.

Walid: So what are you doing later?

Maya: Going home. Why?

Walid: Do you wanna come over to my place?

His question surprised her, a clear and direct offer, with no preamble. Things had definitely changed since she was single and living alone in the city — that is to say, three years ago when she’d met Khalid. Normally it would take more than a drink and ten minutes of passing chitchat for two people to reach this stage. Or perhaps he believed he was within his bounds to proposition her with no preamble because the two of them had already been together. But that was a long time ago and she didn’t feel any real connection between the man who she’d known and the one who was sitting beside her now. In fact, she hadn’t found a way to deal with the past yet, except to completely repudiate it. She didn’t have true feelings, either about her life now or about the years that had led up to now. Every morning she would wake up and think that she’d just been born all of a sudden, but she never really had that refreshing sense of rebirth. In reality, every morning she feels like she’s worse off than the day before. She felt like all the time that had passed — twenty-five years — had been spent trying to be reborn as a being who wouldn’t ever be complete; that’s just her.

His voice roused her.

Walid: It’s really crowded here, let’s go have a drink on the veranda and listen to some good music, what do you say? Afterward, my place is close by.

She smiled at him as though congratulating him for the effort he expended trying to convince her.

Maya: I dunno.

Walid: Okay, I’m getting another drink and coming back.

She observed him carefully while he was moving away. He had a funny walk that was sort of like a caveman. He thrust his legs out and held his shoulders back in such an exaggerated way it seemed artificial, as if to display his virility to the whole world. She remembered the first time she had sex with him; she was sitting on his lap and suddenly he carried her from the living room into the bedroom and threw her on the bed. From that moment on, she started secretly calling him Caveman. But in what followed, it became clear that Caveman was totally preoccupied with his health, to an obsessive-compulsive degree. He was perpetually afraid of a potential heart attack. After they’d made love the first time and were lying together on the bed, he took her hand and put it on his heart.

Walid: It’s beating really fast, isn’t it?