Muhammad Abi Samra - Beirut Noir

When he heard knocking at his door, the bastard immediately recognized his father’s cane. Less surprised — he had been vaguely expecting it — than irritated, he roughly crushed his cigarette in the ashtray while lighting another and getting up to open the door; the next day, he was already abroad.

During this brief meeting, the old man proposed the following alternatives: either live in hell or leave the country for good with a certain sum of money. If no clarification followed the expression “live in hell,” this was for the simple reason that there was no need for it: the bastard knew very well what his father was capable of.

He liked Europe when he first settled there. But a few months later, a strange feeling started tormenting him. What at the beginning was merely a vague sense of some indefinable thing that he missed turned quickly into an unfounded rage. His bitterness deepened and he started drinking hard, with an unquenchable thirst. It was a frequently recurring dream — in which he saw himself sweating profusely under the shadow of his father’s grin — that made him finally decide to once again tread upon the soil of his homeland, and then to rent his low, little house once more.

It took no time for the old man to learn of his son’s return, though his warnings, delivered by messengers, had no effect. So he then took recourse in a far more efficient manner: a gang of five, armed with sticks, beat the bastard down. Some people living in the neighborhood found him near-dead in a dark corner on Assaad al-Assaad Street. His hospital stay was much longer than his brother’s had been two years before. Handicapped for life, he left the hospital with a limp.

It was months later.

After the old man left his legitimate son’s room one afternoon, the latter, sitting all alone, found himself bewitched by the gun his father had placed on his bed. He stared at it with ardent, burning, voracious eyes — but from far away, very far away, as though in this way he were forestalling a dark temptation, which, if he approached even one step, would have been irresistible to him. And those terrible words seemed to still be ringing throughout his room, Kill him, prove to me that I shouldn’t regret my choice!

After a while, he dared to take one step, a second, a third, and then another, and finally he found himself right next to his bed, his head slightly bent over the gun. He wanted to grab it but he merely mimed the gesture and started scrutinizing it again. His anxiety slightly quelled, his mind emptied of just about every thought, he felt himself gradually being devoured by numbing thoughts whose only focus was this weapon.

All of a sudden, the fact that his brother had been born on the same day he was — at almost the exact same time — seemed so strange that he was surprised that he’d never perceived it this way before. And then there was the question of the secret he had just learned about the illegitimate birth — that it had been attributed to the other one by the accident of an incidental gesture — which laid bare the contingent nature of his own fate, and through this even its absurdity. All of this caused a shiver of disgust and horror to convulse him as he thought about the 50 percent probability that it was he himself who was the bastard.

Contradictory ideas quickly passed through his head. As if to stop them, he grabbed the gun, shoved the barrel into his mouth, powerfully clamping it between his teeth and tasting it: unpleasant, cold, metallic. Somersaults of terror, mixed with a trace of pleasure, raced through his body each time he stroked the trigger. He finally made a decision and closed his eyes. But in the dark, small sparks behind his eyelids merged into one frame — first blurry, then little by little taking on more clarity. It was a face — perhaps his brother’s, yes! Definitely his brother’s face, sporting a majestic and disdainful attitude as always, with a broad ironic smile, proud and withering. Anger made him clamp down so hard on the barrel that he broke a tooth. He wanted to shoot, but as soon as he opened his eyes, the image faded away like a dream.

The harassment of months of sleepless nights had led the bastard into a habit of hobbling around Assaad al-Assaad Street and the surrounding area an hour before dawn. Dirty roads accentuated the darkness of his gloomy ideas. However, his ruminations quickly took another path: he thought again about his father, their last meeting and the huge public insult he had committed against him, and the impossibility that the man would not take any action against him... But how would he take action, this father of his, he wondered while walking down his favorite road, the foulest one in the whole neighborhood. This long, thin, mud-filled alley sprawling out in front of him, in which only a tribe of rats elected to live, gave off an intense stench of sewer and decrepitude, strewn here and there with blackish puddles, torturously snaking through all kinds of garbage, rotten food surrounded by swarms of flies, dog and cat corpses devoured by vermin, charred car carcasses, disfigured, dismembered buildings, and other debris that had become unrecognizable with time. He cherished it, this alley. He nurtured a tender compassion for it; this all seemed to him a perfect reflection of his soul. He had never felt any kind of real sympathy before — for either a human or an animal; he couldn’t remember any moment in his life in which he had.

The factors that prompted him to give his father a slap in the face in front of the whole family get-together last week remained obscure to him. He had gone there out of vengeance, an age-old desire to humiliate — at least, that’s what he thought before the incident. But he felt something strange in seeing his father tumble to the ground under the powerful impact of the slap, it was something dark — soothing and dreadful at the same time — that when deciphered would eventually reveal his own fate to him. He only half succeeded in trying to revive this strange sensation. Looking to his right, he noticed a rotting dog, its belly gaping and whence came forth dark battalions / of larvae that flowed out like a thick liquid.

The thought, He is going to have me killed, passed through him like a sweet revelation. He will never forgive, never forget. Even if he wants to, his position at the top of the family hierarchy will prevent him. He has to make an example of me — to preserve his honor, blood must flow.

And thus he understood what had secretly motivated his slap.

He walked peacefully in this filthy alley when he felt something hard pressing on his spine and then climbing up his back, touching the nape of his neck, stopping right at the base of his skull. His fate had been sealed, he knew now; it was only the immediacy of this secretly-hoped-for outcome for which he was somewhat unprepared. Yet all his limbs trembled, he sweated like a pig, his terror was atrocious and indescribable. He had expected anything but this: instead of resigning himself to remaining impassive in the face of death as he had always delighted in imagining he would, he felt the warmth of urine flowing between his thighs. “Like dogs,” he mumbled in a lucid moment, “we die just like dogs!”

In the depth of his desperation, a panting sound reached him, the sound of someone out of breath. He believed it was himself, that it was his own fear. But no, it was the other one. He turned sharply, but it took several seconds to recognize his brother. He seemed just as terrified as he, pale as a cadaver, barely managing to breathe, though strangely he wasn’t shaking at all. In realizing that he was going to be felled by such a despicable and cowardly being, a savage rage possessed him. He wanted to pounce on his brother, bite his neck, rip out his veins, drink his blood and swim in it. It was a bit too late though. A bullet had already penetrated his skull.