Muhammad Abi Samra - Beirut Noir

I was speechless for a while that day, as the juices of anxiety and confusion seeped into my blood. It was the first time since my primary school days that I’d been subjected to restrictions on the way I looked. I’d considered this insignificant and trivial for many years. This was the first time since I’d grown up that I was taking an order not coming from my Party commander but from a woman who associates with people who I hate. Yet as soon as the interview finished and she and Jalal led me to a big apartment, with what I thought was calculated and patronizing kindness, I was unsettled by her raspy voice, which had become friendlier in the absence of Abu Khalid, and by the shape of her body. A flush of embarrassment rose to my face from recalling what we fighters used to repeat to each other — that the best way to break an uppity woman is to approach her sexually like a Soviet steamroller, to collect and disseminate massive force at one point and at one time.

“You have to be the lord of the raid, Abu Sakhr.” That’s what Comrade Abu al-Layl used to say when he came to the apartment to offer us a screening of erotic French films on his Super 8 camera or to meet one of his girlfriends. He was two years older than me, a student at the Faculty of Arts. We were squashed together with Abu al-Izz and other comrades in an apartment we used to call the Serail, in Cola, not far from the party headquarters in Tariq al-Jdeideh.

He would always say, “Let her fade away in your hands, like Yumna, Laure, and Lubna do in mine. Come on, don’t you always hear them roar like wounded lionesses before one of them falls like a ripe apple and then treats me like a god? Oh Abu Sakhr, Newton could have learned from me.”

When he’d say this I wouldn’t tell him that my luck with women had been limited, because I wasn’t handsome or brave. I’d only ever gotten to know women who my comrades didn’t care about and had left to me.

My grandmother, the priest’s wife — who I preferred to think of as senile and who favored my siblings and cousins over me from the time I was young — never stopped reminding me: “Look at your maternal uncle — tall and blond. He’s like a superior-quality spear. Your shortness is inherited from your father and his father. God’s wisdom created him to be near to the ground so he wouldn’t tire himself from always bending over to lift up stones and carve them. Your mother wasn’t lucky... she and her sisters, and there were a lot of them, they had to get married. Your grandfather the priest and I couldn’t put everything we had toward the girls’ dowry and leave your uncle with nothing.”

I recalled Margot’s incipient presence and would repeat to myself every evening: “I won’t be a god for any beautiful woman.” Indeed, if I think the opposite I risk transforming from a brave and faithful Party member whose nerves are calm in battle into an ordinary beggar for passion. Where’s your revolutionary commitment, comrade? I need to stop thinking about her completely: Wife of important comrade + beautiful + Western + rich + misfortune = zero luck .

This wasn’t the first time I’d been attracted to wives or relatives of comrades and friends. I must start a private journey to get control over myself before I show my hand. Hey, Abu Sakhr, what do you think about living in this apartment? The class enemy, even when he’s a comrade, still loves his luxury — and you’re enjoying it. How will you deal with a spacious apartment, decorated with the latest Western furnishings, instead of the trenches? Instead of feeling satisfied with ordinary filth when the shower’s been cut off for days on end? Hey, Abu Sakhr, haven’t you been given this fancy apartment, like some other comrades on the party’s orders, to protect it from being burgled or occupied by other factions and gangs — or because it belongs to rich friends and comrades who left the country fearing for their families, their lives, and their jobs, or because its inhabitants were known enemies?

A fancy apartment belonging to a class enemy and Party comrade: what’s the problem, Abu Sakhr? The Party is powerful. Intellectuals betray their class because they know that this is a historical trend and because they’re good people, honorable people. When the time comes, everything will be in place: doctors, important government employees, and politicians from other parties whose army units we used to infiltrate. The Party is everywhere. Sometimes it’s visible and some of what it does is underground. You’ve loved secrets for a long time. You are primarily a secret to yourself. Don’t worry, you and Abu al-Izz won’t have any trouble finding a cover. In front of your comrades in the Emergency Task Force, you’ll say what Abu Khalid told you to: “The Party protects nationalist personalities to prevent assassinations undertaken by isolationist groups, the no-good Palestinian factions, and the Syrian regime — its commandos and the Baath party.”

I’m with Abu Khalid on this — the Party should be true to its allies even if they are bourgeois. Do you want the Sunni leadership of Beirut to be secretly allied with the Phalangists?

The first thing I thought when I began my new mission of shadowing Margot was that I should go to sleep earlier. I should come up with a dream that would take me away every night. The war, battles, dead bodies, severed heads, imagining my own corpse and its putrid smell after days in the sun at the end of a hot Lebanese spring — this is not the material for a soft, dream-filled sleep. Thinking about women and drinking a lot of wine — I started actually preferring it during my mission — both had the power to anesthetize me like a tired bull. But which women? Those who I encountered didn’t excite me or make me think about their bodies, the movements of their hands, the shape of their breasts, or the distant memory of sex.

Like Naheda, the tall, thin, fierce woman who fearlessly carried a gun and used to say to the comrades who desired her that she had canceled out her virginity “a long time ago — I gave it to heaven.” She used to toy with me even more, saying that she didn’t need “outside intervention. That way I’m never grateful to anyone.” But she’d have sex with me as if she were following military orders — perfunctory, and at regular intervals. “This is a physical need, we shouldn’t give it too much importance,” she’d tell me, justifying herself as she quickly and restlessly picked up her clothes, put on her pants and belt, and strapped her gun to it.

As for Aida, my old college girlfriend, she’d returned to her family’s peaceful village in the north. Friends told me that she’d developed an interest in makeup, jokes, and eating seeds and nuts all the time, so she’d gotten fat. She’d also started refusing to attend local Party meetings with the excuse that she was only used to working with students and that she was reconsidering her ideas. On the few times she visited me during the war, I felt her distant from me, not only in the newly unmeasurable size of her body, but also in her asceticism toward sex, and perhaps toward me. So in my mind, none of the warmth that used to sweep over me when she touched me remained, only reminders of an ancient coldness. I didn’t start drinking until after she’d left, to try to forget. Then I’d wind up drunk, only to wake up hungover and go to the center with one thing in my head, to die in the dark and leave a will that said, Put some apples on my body and write on my grave that I was the worst son of Adam ever to walk the earth and heavens. Oh my grandfather the priest, never accuse me of virtue and hating the lust of the flesh!

Occupation: Internationalist, Arab Communist freedom fighter, holder of permission to drive a personal car, postman, and keeper of dark secrets.