more thing, John.”
Valsamis felt suddenly sick. He leaned toward the window and pushed it open, hoping to temper the lingering odor of stale cigarette smoke, but it was no use, the room was saturated.
“We should take care of the Morais girl as well.” Morrow’s voice was dispassionate, contained. “And the old man, too. Loose ends, you know?”
F OR SEVERAL MONTHS AFTER our return to Lebanon, it looked as if my mother might actually be right. There was a fragile concord that fall and winter. Not so much a peace as a common acknowledgment of the lunacy of war. For the truth of the early conflict was that the rifts it had revealed ran far too deep to ever be forgotten again. And yet, in our eagerness, we all believed.
In Beirut there was an almost hysterical scramble for normalcy, as if people knew the worst was yet to come. There were concerts and dinner parties, even the return of ordinary crime, of holdups and burglaries and murders of passion. In January, Fairuz sang the Rahbani brothers’ Petra at the Piccadilly Theatre, and my grandfather took us all to the opening night.
I was eight at the time, too young for the theater, far too young to understand what the performance meant to a city struggling to forget civil war, but I still remember the spectacle of that evening, the competing smells of expensive perfumes, the textures of the women’s gowns as I moved among them in the foyer. The crush of silk and sequins and fur.
Onstage, her robes catching the lights like the feathers of some exotic bird, what we had all come for, the poor printer’s daughter from the Zuqaq al-blat who had conquered the world, the woman whose voice was our own. Goddess, I’d thought when the curtain first parted to reveal Fairuz standing there, and the entire audience had caught its breath with me.
At intermission someone gave me my first glass of champagne and I wandered, light-headed, through the dark sea of tuxedos, hot and itching in my stockings and tight shoes. When the houselights blinked to signal the end of the intermission, I looked up to see my grandmother pushing her way through the crowd.
She was a beautiful woman, even at her age, slim as a girl from her regular tennis matches at the Summerland Hotel, her hair dark and glossy. She’d worn a red dress that night, an elegant sheath that clung to her waist and thighs, and as she came toward me, I could see the powerful muscles in her arms and legs.
“Where’s your mother?” she asked, bending toward me.
I shook my head. “She said she was going to the bathroom.”
She took my hand and started back into the crowd. The lights blinked a second time, and people began to file slowly back into the theater, reluctant, it seemed, to get back to the story. Even I knew it would end badly. My mother had told me everything in the car on the way there, how Petra refuses to betray her country and how her daughter is killed because of it.
We neared the ladies’ lounge and my grandmother stopped abruptly. “Go back to the theater,” she said, letting go of my hand.
I moved slightly, trying to look past her, but she positioned her body as if to shield me from something.
“Go to your seat,” she hissed. This time there was an edge of threat to her voice, as when I crossed her at home.
I turned to leave, craning my neck as I went, peering past her. I could see my mother in the far corner of the lobby, talking animatedly to a man in an elegant tuxedo who seemed to be listening intently. The man looked to be about my mother’s age, tall, with a neat dark beard and dark eyes.
My mother was leaning with one shoulder against the wall and her back to us, sweeping her hair over one ear as she spoke, a gesture I recognized as one of nervousness. She was wearing a dress not unlike my grandmother’s, only black, and from the back the two women looked so much alike that it would have been difficult to tell one from the other had I not already known who was
Valsamis felt suddenly sick. He leaned toward the window and pushed it open, hoping to temper the lingering odor of stale cigarette smoke, but it was no use, the room was saturated.
“We should take care of the Morais girl as well.” Morrow’s voice was dispassionate, contained. “And the old man, too. Loose ends, you know?”
F OR SEVERAL MONTHS AFTER our return to Lebanon, it looked as if my mother might actually be right. There was a fragile concord that fall and winter. Not so much a peace as a common acknowledgment of the lunacy of war. For the truth of the early conflict was that the rifts it had revealed ran far too deep to ever be forgotten again. And yet, in our eagerness, we all believed.
In Beirut there was an almost hysterical scramble for normalcy, as if people knew the worst was yet to come. There were concerts and dinner parties, even the return of ordinary crime, of holdups and burglaries and murders of passion. In January, Fairuz sang the Rahbani brothers’ Petra at the Piccadilly Theatre, and my grandfather took us all to the opening night.
I was eight at the time, too young for the theater, far too young to understand what the performance meant to a city struggling to forget civil war, but I still remember the spectacle of that evening, the competing smells of expensive perfumes, the textures of the women’s gowns as I moved among them in the foyer. The crush of silk and sequins and fur.
Onstage, her robes catching the lights like the feathers of some exotic bird, what we had all come for, the poor printer’s daughter from the Zuqaq al-blat who had conquered the world, the woman whose voice was our own. Goddess, I’d thought when the curtain first parted to reveal Fairuz standing there, and the entire audience had caught its breath with me.
At intermission someone gave me my first glass of champagne and I wandered, light-headed, through the dark sea of tuxedos, hot and itching in my stockings and tight shoes. When the houselights blinked to signal the end of the intermission, I looked up to see my grandmother pushing her way through the crowd.
She was a beautiful woman, even at her age, slim as a girl from her regular tennis matches at the Summerland Hotel, her hair dark and glossy. She’d worn a red dress that night, an elegant sheath that clung to her waist and thighs, and as she came toward me, I could see the powerful muscles in her arms and legs.
“Where’s your mother?” she asked, bending toward me.
I shook my head. “She said she was going to the bathroom.”
She took my hand and started back into the crowd. The lights blinked a second time, and people began to file slowly back into the theater, reluctant, it seemed, to get back to the story. Even I knew it would end badly. My mother had told me everything in the car on the way there, how Petra refuses to betray her country and how her daughter is killed because of it.
We neared the ladies’ lounge and my grandmother stopped abruptly. “Go back to the theater,” she said, letting go of my hand.
I moved slightly, trying to look past her, but she positioned her body as if to shield me from something.
“Go to your seat,” she hissed. This time there was an edge of threat to her voice, as when I crossed her at home.
I turned to leave, craning my neck as I went, peering past her. I could see my mother in the far corner of the lobby, talking animatedly to a man in an elegant tuxedo who seemed to be listening intently. The man looked to be about my mother’s age, tall, with a neat dark beard and dark eyes.
My mother was leaning with one shoulder against the wall and her back to us, sweeping her hair over one ear as she spoke, a gesture I recognized as one of nervousness. She was wearing a dress not unlike my grandmother’s, only black, and from the back the two women looked so much alike that it would have been difficult to tell one from the other had I not already known who was
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