Rabee Jaber - The Mehlis Report

Her words add to his fatigue. This isn’t like her. What’s happening? But then again, he isn’t himself today either. They wore themselves out in the bedroom. Why’d they wear themselves out? He looks at her hair, long and black and straight, and he looks at her marble back. Why did she put on the dress again if she doesn’t want to go out?

You like Japanese, he replies, so why don’t we order from Maji, or from Sushi Bar?

She says she’ll eat some cake to celebrate her new job with him, but that he can order whatever he likes, that he should pick something and she’ll order it for him, he always pays, but tonight she’d like him to be her guest, that’s what she wants.

He says he feels the same, he’s not hungry enough for a full meal, he’d rather just have dessert, he’ll eat some cake with her and have some tea. Now come over here, he adds.

She draws closer and places her hand on his head, but doesn’t sit on his lap. She’s standing beside him now — he rests his ear against her stomach, and he can hear the blood coursing through her body. She asks him to order something, please, don’t say you’re not hungry, or let me make some food for you, and then we’ll eat cake.

I’m really not hungry, he says, and if I wanted to I’d order something. I want us to eat cake together and celebrate.

She pours some tea into two cups. A spoonful of sugar for her. Two spoonfuls for him. Cecilia knows him well. We’ll celebrate twice, she says. Once because I’m finished at Spinney’s. Now that I’ve left I can say what an awful place it was; or maybe it wasn’t awful, but it certainly wasn’t a good fit for me; I can say so now that it’s over. There was a hideous man there, he was so thick-skinned, as if he were made of rubber, and he’d say the most horrible things. One time on TV we saw a woman burning, a car had exploded as she was getting in, and she had caught on fire. A young man rushed over to her and wrapped her up in a sheet to put out the flames: he said that when he’d put the fire out, the woman was still conscious, and he said she’d thanked him. Her hand was burned, and later the doctors amputated it, and her leg as well; the woman didn’t lose consciousness, she could see her arm burned completely through, there was nothing left but bone — she could see the bones of her hand while they carried her off to intensive care. And that man who worked with us, the rubber man, was looking at the TV as if he were eating her up with his eyes, and then he looked at us, and he kept joking around and saying awful things and laughing.

There are a lot of insensitive people in the world, says Saman Yarid.

Cecilia says no, it’s not that, it’s not that he’s insensitive, that’s not what I’m saying; it’s hard for you to understand what I mean, let’s not talk about it.

We’re celebrating because you left Spinney’s. What else are we celebrating?

She smiles and says, we’re celebrating a lot things.

A car horn goes off outside, and another one answers it. A lot of roads come together in this neighborhood, and the traffic becomes quite congested here at night.

She brings over two plates, and some silverware. The car horns stop for a moment, then go off in a single blast again. They can hear a man shouting, and then a woman. Beirut is tense. Everyone is skittish. But the steam still rises from the teacups. And the cake smells sweet.

Cecilia says she hesitated before taking the job.

He asks her why.

She says the previous kitchen manager never stepped down.

What happened? Saman asks. Did they fire him?

She shakes her head to say “no” while lifting a piece of cake from the box to his plate. A piece covered in chocolate, adorned with nuts and a ring of delicate white cream.

What happened then? Saman asks her.

He wanted to add, “Did he die, for example?” But he didn’t.

Cecilia lifts another piece of cake from the box, looks into her boyfriend’s face, and then says the cook disappeared, he disappeared and no one knows what happened to him, his family doesn’t know where he’s gone, and neither do his colleagues at work; he disappeared without ever resigning from his job in the kitchen, and without anyone firing him. But that’s not the strangest thing about the whole business. The thing that confused the police and the authorities was that the cameras at Monoprix recorded the cook entering the supermarket at the beginning of the workday, but they never recorded him leaving it. The man disappeared inside the place.

The man Cecilia loved was killed during the war. His name is engraved on the martyrs’ monument in Sassine Square. Saman Yarid has heard parts of his story. The man was her cousin on her mother’s side, a few years older than Cecilia. She had grown attached to him when she was just a child. It was as if she’d emerged from the womb loving him. The massacres transformed him: all that blood had an effect on him. He stopped showing up at her house (the house of his aunt), or at the home of his own family. That period lasted a long time. Then he regained his laughter, and the darkness receded from his eyes. As if his body were full of light again. He stopped sleeping at the party headquarters and started staying at home again. He was not killed in a battle. He was not killed on the front line or in a raid. He was killed by an errant round of shells between the two halves of the city. Cecilia saw him naked after they had cleaned the corpse. Among the women drowning in black dresses his body had seemed so white. A body as white as cotton, smooth, without a single hair, like the body of a boy, or that of a woman: unblemished, whole, without a scar. But there was a piece of tape on the nipple of his right breast.

George Azar was buried in the Mar Mitr Cemetery. Cecilia’s mother fell ill shortly afterward. Her illness lasted one or two months, then she recovered. Saman Yarid does not know anyone in Cecilia’s family except for one aunt on her mother’s side who has three children and lives in the Sin al-Fil suburb of Beirut. He had met her here, at Cecilia’s place. Afterward, he told his girlfriend that she had some of her aunt’s features. Cecilia replied that her family thinks she got her looks from her father’s side, not her mother’s. When her mother died in 1989, Cecilia had a mental and physical breakdown. Her father helped her through that period. But it wasn’t long until her father left her in turn, during the fourth year of peace after the war. The father died in those complicated and incomprehensible days that followed the explosion in the Our Lady of Salvation Church, the bombing which led to the arrest of Samir Geagea, the head of the Lebanese Forces, and to his being put in the underground Defense Ministry prison in the Yarze district. Cecilia inherited this apartment from her father, along with a small share in the Winner’s restaurant on Sassine Square. The restaurant went bankrupt shortly thereafter, but the apartment remained.

It’s now the beginning of October 2005. Cecilia has started her new job at Monoprix, and Saman Yarid sees her almost every day. Sometimes she works quite late, until ten in the evening: she has to clean up the kitchen and prepare everything for the following day. She doesn’t cook at night; she does the cooking early in the morning. But she stays late to prepare what’s needed for the following morning: the mornings are always hectic and busy. She has some assistants: two young women and a young man. The man divides his time between two different departments: the kitchen and the meat locker.

Cecilia tells Saman that the women who work at Monoprix say the cook who disappeared was extremely polite. He was known as a quiet type, someone who always spoke kindly to others, who stayed above the employees’ squabbles and quarreling. And he was known for how good-natured he was whenever he ventured into the fish department: he was somehow related to the tall lean man in charge of the fish. And like that man, his two big hands caught people’s eyes. He had a family and some siblings, but he wasn’t married, and had passed the age of marriage.