Rabee Jaber - The Mehlis Report

The reading halls are teeming with readers. The green lamps there look beautiful. I can see them from a distance as I come to gather the books from the tables and reshelve them at the closing hour. The exchange of greetings. Water cups thrown in the trash bins. Steam on the windows. A young blonde in a red dress sits in a corner. A book with colored pictures lies open in front of her. I always see her in that corner, and she’s always reading the same book. She reads the book and plays with her wooden bracelets and her hair. She reads and drinks some water. Your heart soars when she looks at you. She has a way of looking at people — one that fills them with love for this world.

Beauty here is found on the inside. One man smells like lemons: he must have loved orange groves. Another man murmurs like a stream: he was an insomniac in the land of the living, but here that murmur puts him to sleep. In one of the halls a reader’s head is ringed with a halo of moonlight: that’s how he feels toward the land of the living. In another corridor, I hear an old man let out a sudden laugh — the laugh of a young boy.

Seeing these people leaves a taste under your tongue.

From their skin the women exude that moist air that follows the first autumn rain.

A man smells of cakes and manakish sandwiches: he was killed by sniper fire on his way to the bakery. He walks between the bookshelves with his back still bent — an old habit. I watch him as he opens one of the tomes and stands there to read. I point him toward an empty chair at an empty table. He thanks me. I bring him some water. He says he loves this book. I tell him that makes me happy.

I watch them and write about them, and I’m scared. I feel as if I’m falling, falling beyond known borders. I’m scared of them getting angry. Then I remember that these pages are my own. That I’m writing them for my own sake. That I’m writing them because I cannot do otherwise. But I write without ever losing this feeling: that I’m falling, that I’m beyond the borders of the world.

I once saw a man who wrote his story and then looked down at the words and found he did not understand his life. Without noticing it, he had written what was engraved on his tombstone in the land of the living. He read those words and dates and realized they said nothing. Those words were not his life. They had no value. He wanted to write down words that told his life. He had been a pastor beloved by his parish. Now he was a pastor no longer. How could he write about his life? What should he write? There used to be a pine tree in front of his church, its trunk covered in resin. He once saw a butterfly stuck in it. He took a knife and cut out a piece of the hardened resin with the butterfly inside. That’s what he wanted to write. That was his life.

I see a young woman, a woman my age, with marks on her face. I know she was killed by gunfire. I watch her read, and from time to time she turns around and looks in this direction. Is she looking at me or at the water cooler? There’s a water cooler here, by my table. What’s she thinking when she looks at the water?

I shouldn’t give in to black thoughts. There are rooms as cramped as coffins in the eastern wing. Each room barely has enough space for a table and a chair for a single person to sit on. Here is a man who used to write for personal gain, not for love of writing. He used to write for the sake of prestige. In this world he only writes a single sentence. “I write so as not to choke.” That’s the sentence. He has to write it over and over again on the page, from right to left, from top to bottom. The room, cramped as a coffin, is filled with white paper, stacks and stacks of it, and every night they bring more. They only take away the paper he’s blackened with that sentence. I write so as not to choke. If his hand gets tired from writing those words and slows down, the stacks of paper start to pile up over his head, suffocating him. There’s a small opening in the ceiling through which some air can enter. If the white pages close it, he chokes.

I am unable to comprehend all the laws of the library. I’ve been looking for certain books for years, but cannot find them. I’ve seen those books before, but where are they now?

I read a book about a city full of soil. It’s hard to move through all that dirt. People tend to be lazy there. If you open the door to your room, it’s difficult to close it again. The soil is heavy. How will you get the door closed now?

There’s a section of the library devoted to old manuscripts. It contains the prophecies of Spyridon the Miraculous. That man (who bore the name of the old saint) lived in Beirut at the end of the 18th century and foretold the unrest of 1860. The language of that time is strange, but I can understand it. He foretold many wars and wrote of an earthquake that would strike the Ottoman Empire two centuries after his death, whereupon the morning star would rise over Constantinople and the city would be flooded with water, and whales would swim from Jaffa to Latakia, over the ruins of the land of Syria. The pages of the manuscript are yellow. They crumble between your fingers.

On another side of the library the drawing halls can be found. There’s a woman drawing a horse. And there’s Gibran, who has discovered he does not have to write, so now he draws instead. He’s not happy with his drawings, he wants to erase them, but that’s forbidden. Each time he looks at one of his own illustrations he feels pain, and wants to stop.

There’s a tall window on one side of the drawing halls. There are fruit trees beyond the window. And there’s a round pond, and children feeding bread to the ducks.

There’s a wooden seat that I like out there, green and shaded by a cypress tree. I take a book and head over to it. The terraced fields below where I’m sitting are covered in carpets of green grass and beds of bright flowers. A cobblestone path runs through those fields. No, not cobblestone. Flat light-colored stones. I don’t go down there. I look at the stones from here as I read. I grow tired of reading and look up out of the words at the path cutting through the fields. Birds are chirping in the trees. A white cat emerges from a bush, then disappears into another one. I have a bottle of water with me. I drink and read some more, and think about Johannes’s words. Why did I leave the library? He said the rat’s hungry. So why did I leave the library and come to this park?

I once found a book when I was sitting here. I opened it, even though I wasn’t in the mood to read. But after reading the first sentence I found myself reading the second one, and then the third, and the fourth. It was a strange book. I read the whole thing and felt that I had not understood it. I understood it, and I didn’t. I told myself I needed to read it again.

Did I ever read it again? I can’t remember anymore. What book was it?

The memories escape me. Memories of the world of the living. And memories of this world too.

I read the first page, then the second, then the third. I read twenty pages. I pause between each page, trying to grasp what I’ve read. There are over two hundred words on a single page. I read short sentences, and long ones. I didn’t know these things about these people. Now I know. But what can you know from two hundred words? Not much. Life is short. It’s hard to know much. Now I know. I drink some water, look at the words, then get up. The corridor is filled with tomes.

When I heard the blast, I did not understand. It felt like a blade was slicing into my skull. I heard the explosion, and didn’t. I saw the burst of flames. A white cascade of fire, and cars soaring through the air. But I did not understand. I could not conceive it. It was as if I’d lost consciousness. I did not see the balconies of the Saint Georges Hotel coming down, but I saw the glass of the car shatter and melt. I saw the fire scorch our clothes. Then my eyes darkened, and it was as if I’d lost consciousness. When I opened my eyes, I was no longer in the burning car. I was standing by myself on Parliament Square. I was standing in the shade by the Abd Clock Tower and drinking a bottle of water.