Rabee Jaber - The Mehlis Report

Saman moves cautiously. He pours himself another cup — the sound of the coffee streaming from the pot into it. The quiet night. And beyond the wall, outside, the city murmuring in its sleep. A few minutes ago while he was sitting in bed, he had looked out the window and seen the yellow line of lights from one of the streets of Burj Hammoud. The houses were packed close together, and the lights were climbing up the foothills. The city was utterly still. What is he doing here?

If he went back into the bedroom, would he be able to find his clothes and put them on and leave without. Could he manage to slip out without making any noise? Could he slip out like a ghost, without Liliane noticing or waking up or asking him what was going on, or why he was getting dressed, or where he was going in the night?

He washes his face in the bathroom. A line of ants is crawling on the washing machine. From the narrow window he can see a spotlight, beyond all the run-down tin-roof houses. The penetrating light is a mixture of white and yellow, and is suspended from massive steel arms. The night shift at a construction site. The clamor does not reach him here. All these houses and shacks! All these tin and concrete roofs! How many families live in this tangled mesh of neighborhoods? How do they sleep in this heat? And who’s building a high-rise here?

His father told him this whole place used to be terraced fields of olive and mulberry trees. And orange trees had been planted at the lower end of the plain. This entire area used to be full of green gardens. Gazelles could be seen here in the days of his grandfather. And over there, where the Beirut River flows into the sea and where the brown landfill, spotted with green grass in the springtime, now rises up — there at the river’s mouth you could see slender white fish with pink flesh. The French used to farm those fish. But on this plain, between the gardens, they built an airport and cargo holds. His grandmother told him she used to come here on Sundays with her family, after Mass. They used to come to Daoud Pasha Park to hear the French military band play, and to watch the planes take off from the airport there, circle above the mountain, and then land again.

The concrete houses and tin roofs multiply before his eyes. They advance from all four directions and bear down on this narrow window, bear down on his eyes, bear down on his chest. It’s as if the walls are falling in on the cramped apartment. This awful headache. He thought the coffee had cured him. The pain had receded for a moment, but returns with renewed force. He has to escape. To slip out. To leave. He’s got to leave now. But he can’t move. It’s impossible. He’s chained to the walls. And to his pounding head. Paralyzed, captive.

“A nightmare,” thinks Saman Yarid, and he sees himself getting dressed and walking out into the street: the way is long; a row of columns and orange lights; and himself, walking.

He won’t go in to the office today. He wants to relax. He’ll take a day off, a day away from work. He won’t look at any maps, take any calls, or drink the office coffee. He takes a long shower: that sweet water. It flows over his head, his shoulders, his back. Then he slowly dries himself off. A cold beer is waiting for him in the fridge, but he decides not to drink it. He takes it out then puts it back in the fridge again. He makes a cup of warm milk instead. He drinks some of the milk and lays down on his bed. He wants to sleep, if only for an hour. Maybe he’ll forget last night. It was as if he’d arrived back at his place from a trip to hell. He recalls the line of ants crawling on the washer: one of the ants seemed to grow larger in front of him — it swelled up and rushed forward to encounter another rushing ant. The insects moved darkly. They both stopped as they came together. The head of the one ant touched the head of the other. And then the first one quickly continued on its way. Why did they freeze up for a moment like that, their two heads touching? And why did they both continue on their way again so quickly? And the most important question of all, Saman: Why are you thinking about ants?

He laughs as he sits up again to drink some more milk, beneath the high ceiling. There’s no need to turn on the air conditioning. It’s cool here. The weather is pleasant, and there’s no need to listen to the AC. He drinks his milk and dozes off a bit. He wants to sleep, to forget what happened yesterday. He made a mistake. He shouldn’t have stayed out so late with Liliane. He should have sat here and watched TV, or gone and had dinner with Roger at Al Dente. But he wasn’t in the mood to spend time with Roger. Had he been in the mood for Liliane? It was stupidity, nothing more. A psychological shortcoming. “Some unknown internal deficiency,” thinks Saman Yarid. She had called to ask what he was doing. He said he was sitting down. Should I come over? she asked. He hesitated a moment and then said no, I’ll come over and we’ll go to Kaslik, it’s been a long time since I’ve been in that area, let’s go there.

She said all of Kaslik was empty these days, people were afraid of explosions, and everyone was going out on this side of town, so why don’t we go to Al-Balad instead, it’s closer, and that the food’s better than anything in Kaslik.

He said he was tired of Al-Balad, and wanted to drive for a while.

They went out in Kaslik. With each glass, he told himself he would not drink another. But he knew himself. The first glass was just the start. He drank a lot. Even though he was thinking the whole time: I don’t want to drink, I’ll go out with Liliane for an hour, or maybe two, and then I’ll go home, Cecilia’s at work now, but she’ll be done in an hour. The night shift ends at 11:30, she had said, but she’s staying past closing. There are a few things she wants to make sure of, there are aisles full of stuff, and she’s got orders as well, there are always a lot of big orders for Monday morning, and on the weekend, but the orders these days are bigger than ever before, it’s Ramadan, and the work never ends at Monoprix during Ramadan, empty cars flock there from the four corners of Beirut and leave filled to the brim with food, more evidence that the Civil War has ended, fifteen years of peace seem inconclusive, but the sight of Monoprix’s kitchen and all the orders coming in during Ramadan, that’s decisive proof.

Saman said he didn’t know the people of West Beirut shopped at Monoprix.

You wouldn’t believe the number of pots on the boil in our kitchen, Cecilia replied. She said she had asked the management to hire three more assistants — she won’t be able to keep up with the orders if they don’t.

He went out with Liliane to a nightclub next to the Espace Cinema. Where were the Sunday crowds he knew so well? The whole area used to be packed, the traffic always at a standstill. Where were the Russian and Bulgarian women who used to line up by the road? Where were the foreigners, the locals, the people from the Gulf? The place wasn’t exactly desolate, but it seemed so. Saman Yarid thought it must be his state of mind. It’s been so up and down lately. It wasn’t like him. He was discovering dark regions inside himself he’d never known before. Cecilia was the cause; he knew that. He knew and he didn’t. Did he know it? When he’s with her, a strange feeling comes over him: he feels as if he has never known anything in his life. He thought he used to know things, but now he doesn’t know them. He always watches her when she tells him about her work, about the layout of the place, about the girls working there, about a manager named Albert Naqqash, about the security people, about the cameras and surveillance devices, about the fresh local produce that arrives at dawn from the vegetable market beside the Sports City stadium, about the imported vegetables brought in from the port in the evening. She talks and talks and talks and he never gets tired of listening. She’s been laughing more these days, but sometimes she grows sad and falls silent. She suddenly becomes absentminded in the middle of a sentence, and her gaze wanders off to some distant unseen place, to a place of shadows, falling on some remote spot and losing itself there. In those moments, it feels as if she’s slipped out of his grasp — kidnapped, snatched away in the blink of an eye and taken to some place he doesn’t know, a place he can’t bring her back from.