Rabee Jaber: The Mehlis Report

“I stayed where I was. The cars coming from Rue Clemenceau stopped at the light. There was a huge red sign in the broad front window of the bank across the street. They’d built that bank in the past few years. It wasn’t old; it wasn’t like that house with the arches. The bank was all glass and steel, and blood-red signs adorned its lobby. I looked at the window and saw myself reflected standing there like an idiot. I saw the old house with the arches, and a cloud passing over the cypress trees, and I saw myself once more. Then I saw the bank guard watching me. Just because I was looking at the city reflected in the window? Was he really staring at me just because of that?

“But he wasn’t staring at me. He crossed Rue Clemenceau and entered a parking lot and started talking to another guard and some men playing cards. The men were sitting by a small bus with a raised open door in the back, and four other men were playing cards inside the bus. A game outside the bus, a game inside the bus. They were playing and eating lupine beans and boiled corn. There were a few similar buses a short distance away, and more card games. Two men were sitting on rattan chairs, playing dominoes in front of a small store with steps leading down below the sidewalk. The entrance was full of old books: it was a used bookstore. There was a school across from it. These were school buses. The bus drivers were playing cards while they waited for the bell to sound. I couldn’t hear the bone dice rattling on the wood, but I heard the laughter. In another bus, a fat driver was sitting behind the steering wheel with his head leaned back and one of his bare arms hanging out the window. He had to be asleep. His belly was on the wheel.

“What was I doing here? I started walking again, toward where the street to the house branched off. I looked out the corner of my eye as I passed it, but didn’t see the man. I stopped and stared down the street. Asphalt, then dirt and grass. I took a few steps into the street. The gate was locked up with chains. He couldn’t possibly have opened the gate and locked it again so quickly. He would have had to open the lock, then get the chains off the bars of the gate, and then — after entering — loop the chains around again and lock the gate. That would take time, and I hadn’t given him all that time.

“Had he jumped the gate and gone into the house? From here I could see the tiles of the entryway. And I could see the balcony tiles as well. They seemed to have been swept clean. Dry leaves were strewn about the garden. There was some briar as well; and empty glass bottles; and a candle stub melted on one of the bottles. But someone had clearly swept the tiles. There was also an electrical cord running through the blinds of a window into the house. Maybe it was connected to a generator. The house didn’t look deserted. But if it wasn’t locked up, and if its owners weren’t out of the country, then why were those chains on the gate?

“In all likelihood the house had been locked up. But someone was still living in it. Who sneaks into a house and starts living there?”

Mary calls from Baltimore. She asks him why he doesn’t simply pack his clothes in two suitcases, lock the door of the house, and come to America. She says it’s been years since he’s come to visit. She says the children are constantly asking about their uncle. She says their house is big, and he can settle down there. Or they can arrange a separate home for him if he prefers. The restaurant is doing well, and the bakery makes bread day and night. What’s he doing in Beirut? Every day there’s another explosion, God protect you. Why are you staying in Beirut, Saman? Thomas has grown into a young man, she says, and looks like his uncle. And she says Marta, the daughter of Boutros Yarid, married Tony Haddad. You know, Matanius, who was with you in the club. Mary’s voice comes strangely from beyond the sea. It rings in his ears. It rings through the emptiness of the colossal house. These high ceilings spawn echoes. And apart from those ceilings, today his shoulders are bearing the burden of a head that rattles like a jar full of stones. He drank a lot yesterday. Drank a lot, and danced a lot, and didn’t get to sleep until very late. It’s strange she’s mentioning Tony Haddad now, since just last night Tony had crossed his mind: he was dancing, his breath coming quickly, and the young woman vanished among the crowded bodies, then reappeared. At that moment, he remembered lifting weights in his youth, and he thought about Matanius as he left the dance floor and headed to his table with memories of the Sons of Neptune Sports Club coming back to him. And now here’s Mary talking about Matanius.

Mary says it’s been years since he’s come to visit. And the children have been asking about him. Saman’s mind wanders as she speaks. She’s had this trait her whole life: Whenever she gets worked up about something, it takes her a full hour to let go of it — she just keeps on talking and talking. He explores the emptiness of the house like a butterfly flitting among the massive old pieces of furniture (nobody makes sofas like these anymore, wardrobes like these, tables like these, tall framed mirrors like these). And whenever he returns from his wanderings, he hears her mention the names of her children once more, or the names of relatives he remembers, and those of some he no longer remembers. Who are these people? And why is she talking about them? He had forgotten them when they left the city. He had forgotten them when they left Achrafieh. She says Antoine Dabbana opened a shawarma and falafel restaurant just a block away from their restaurant, on the other side of the church, but it isn’t doing so well. No one has ever seen him light a single candle in the church, she says; and then she says Joseph was coughing a lot this week and that he wanted to.

Her far-off words fail to reach him. They come out of the receiver, true. They fill the empty space of the house with the sound of a woman who misses her brother, true. Yet his feeling of distance increases: that’s true as well. Do her words actually enter his head, his body? His eyes grow heavy, and he disappears into a world of his own. As if it were last night again, as if he were still on Monot Street, dancing in the Crystal Club, drinking cocktails that set his face ablaze. As if he were still in the crowd of redolent bodies, the energy and heat pouring out of them, and he’d felt powerless, as if he had aged years in a single blow, as if he had suddenly grown old, had turned into an old man in the blink of an eye. How had this happened? Where had this weakness come from? He’d been dancing, the music blasting, the woman hovering around him, moving nearer and then backing away again, and when he drew her to him she yielded to his hands, no longer hostile or boorish; she’d become pliant, and he’d felt her limbs relax against his as if she were melting, clinging to him like wax. He could smell her. She’d smelled like cigarettes. He couldn’t stand Winstons — he didn’t know how a woman could smoke such heavy cigarettes. It had seemed to him that he was no longer attracted to her. Not after dancing with her. He hadn’t liked the way she held the cigarette, nor the way she held her glass. And he certainly hadn’t liked the way she talked, her terse and annoying expressions. He generally avoided adolescents. But could this young woman really be called an adolescent when she was putting her ivory arms around his neck and letting her head fall on his shoulders? The strong smell of the tobacco had suddenly stopped annoying him. She’d become one with it, the hot scent of a female seeking a male, and that scent emanated from her and flooded his head. Yet he’d been filled with weakness. What had weakened him?

Mary says it’s been years since he’s come to visit them, and they’ve missed him. She says he hasn’t come since the towers fell in New York, and now things are bad in Beirut, all the car bombs, and they say things are tense in the camps. Don’t you know what that means? Why don’t you lock up the house and come to America?