Rabee Jaber - The Mehlis Report

“Unless they’re lying.”

This time she doesn’t laugh. But she gives him a smile, a smile to silence the world, so incredible that it seems as if all the customers in the restaurant are holding their breath.

He orders a coffee when he gets back to the office. He unties his shoelaces and settles into the big chair. Seeing Yara has revived him, restored his heart. He needed that dose of life. Emily’s phone call had worn him out even more than Mary’s earlier one. Her anxious tone caught him off guard. As did her words.

“What’s happening over there? The camps are full of weapons? Is it true the army’s surrounded the camps? And that the Palestinians want to occupy the city? Why didn’t you tell me?”

The phone call seemed like part of some dark nightmare to him, its origins unknown. The phone surprised him as soon as he walked into the office that morning — arriving late from his house as usual.

When he had gathered his breath, he asked her who had told her all this, who had she been speaking to?

Emily said her friend Antoinette — “you know her, Antoinette Fayad, we all used to hang out” — had called her today, had called and woken her up and asked her for help because the war might start at any minute. She said she wants to leave Beirut immediately, she wants to come to Paris, and asked if she could stay with her until she found some work and a place to live.

Saman Yarid laughed: “And what did you tell her?”

Hearing his laughter, Emily didn’t know what to say.

“Listen,” Saman said, feeling a weight on his chest. He said that right then he couldn’t remember exactly who Antoinette was, he couldn’t put a face to the name, but that doesn’t matter. What matters is that her friend is half-demented and half-opportunistic. Things are tense in the country, granted, but don’t believe everything you hear, Emily. You’re Lebanese first, and French second. Have you forgotten how people talk here? A few months ago, in March, we said the war was coming, with the Shia fighting against the Sunni, the Druze, and the Christians. Then, at the beginning of summer, after the elections, we said the war would start as it had in ’75: with the Shia, Sunni, and Druze against the Christians. A few days ago, Jumblatt wrangled with Siniora, and again we said the war was coming: with the Shia and Druze against the Sunni and Christians. And now your friend Antoinette wants to set the refugees loose on Beirut so she can go travel around France. She’s not right in the head. Don’t believe what she says. She’s lost her mind.

Saman said half the people in Beirut were like that these days: they’re buying sedatives and antidepressants by the pound. No one’s happy these days except the pharmacists. What can we do? It’s a critical time, but it will pass.

Emily said she’d send him an email.

It was his good fortune that Yara came today. As he watched her eat the Chinese food he wanted to tell her the story about Antoinette and the camps and the phone call. But he didn’t. He let her talk, while he looked on and listened.

They had some Chinese desert after the meal. Seared dried plums were glowing in the ceramic bowl, a yellow layer of rice paste beneath them. He looked at the elegant bracelet on her wrist, and at the chopsticks coming and going. The air coming from the AC was neither strong nor weak. The place was calm. All his tension seeped away. What tension? He felt a boundless tranquility as he looked at her. He forgot the morning’s phone calls.

She asked him what he thinks, what will Mehlis write in his report, will he reveal the truth?

He said Mehlis has two options: Either (1) he reveals the truth; or (2) he doesn’t reveal the truth.

“No, really, what do you think? What have you heard? Your friend who works in the papers — what has he told you?”

“He says what everyone’s saying. He says one thing, and then he says the opposite. No one will know what the investigating commission has to say until the commission has said it. It shouldn’t differ too much from the fact-finding mission that came before it. FitzGerald was from the UN. And so is Mehlis. The problem isn’t what the report says. The problem is what happens to us after that.”

Yara smiled and said she’s not afraid. Her family is, and so are her friends. Everyone who works with her is afraid. One moment they’re happy; the next they’re worried and scared. Even if they don’t always say it. But they do say it. And even if they didn’t say it, she’d know they’re afraid. The tension is obvious. They can’t conceal it. She can tell from the way they move, from their clothes and their hair, from the tone of their voices, from the way they talk and exchange greetings. She often sees them speaking and laughing with the Bangladeshi cleaning lady in the corridor by the bathroom. Since when do they talk to the cleaning lady?

Yara said she’s not afraid, but she feels strangely uneasy at times, as if she were asleep, or acting in a movie. She smiled again and lowered her head. She said the whole thing’s like a detective novel: “There’s a criminal, and there’s a detective going around looking for evidence and detaining suspects. He examines the crime scene and the victims’ remains. He dives with a team into the sea and comes out with pieces of the exploded cars. He gathers all the leads and testimonies and accusations, and compares them. He looks at bank accounts, analyzing the data and drawing conclusions. Then he writes a report, outlining everything he’s found. And if the report is complete, he’ll tell us the criminal’s name at the end of it.”

“The appearance of an enormous rat in the kitchen of a house has sparked terror in the Burj Hammoud neighborhood in the eastern part of the Lebanese capital Beirut. Rita Narkiziyan, a neighborhood resident, said the families there are still living in a state of fear. Vicky Shahrouri, a housewife, recently came home from the market, and when she opened the door to her apartment she heard some movement in the kitchen. She said she went in and saw a gray animal that looked like a dog moving about near the refrigerator, and when she realized it was a rat she started screaming for help. Her neighbor on the same floor, Naoum Koukajiyan, said he rushed into the open apartment and saw the rat climb onto a table and leave through a window. An employee from an appliance store on the same street said he looked up when he heard the screams and saw a strange black object moving on the wall: it crawled down and disappeared behind some tin-roof houses. A large number of residents gathered and chased the rat, but it disappeared into a large sewer hole at the edge of a garbage dump; and since the dump is surrounded by walls and wire, and since its gates were locked, the residents were unable to enter. An eyewitness said the rat was the size of a small donkey and had long nails. Hilda Manukian, the seamstress who owns the tailor shop on the bottom floor of the aforementioned building, said she was just going out to deliver a dress when she saw the rat run down the road and disappear. She wanted to scream but couldn’t, as if she had something in her mouth. One of the store’s customers claimed the rat was brown, and that it had hair like a cat and only one eye. But other witnesses said it had two eyes and the only special thing about it was that it was so very large and moved more quickly than your ordinary rat. It is believed that the rat lives in the heart of the mountain of garbage that separates this densely populated residential district from the sea. They refer to the trash heap as Mount Burj Hammoud, part of a dump site created during the fifteen-year-long Lebanese war that began in 1975. Some 150,000 people were killed during the war, which ended with the Taif Agreement, reached in the city of Taif in Saudi Arabia.