Beirut Blues by Hanan al-Shaykh

soon as I find out where I’m going to end up. Or I’ll write to your address in Lebanon. The Lebanese post is bound to start working again soon. In any case I’ll definitely write.”
    Everything was in uproar in the city’s damp heat. In one place the departing fighters were covered in flowers; flowers were stuck everywhere: in gun barrels, buttonholes, jeeps and civilian cars. When you boarded the ship, I was lying in bed thinking of a way to smuggle you out across the mountains past the houses with red-tiled roofs and green-painted windows, and the pine trees and laurels; I had absolute faith that all these things would stand with us and prevent anyone trying to drag you from your hiding place. I believed until yesterday that you would never escape by sea. You would continue to trust that the city and its labyrinths would love and protect you. I had thought about getting you a forged passport, or taking your case to the U.N., or driving you out in my car. You had shaken your head; perhaps you saw another reality: that this country was no longer open to all who descended on it, with customs officials who stamped passports and didn’t look too closely. Your intuition wassounder than mine, even though you had been shut away in that room. My car, with us on board heading for safety, looked about as secure as a cardboard box carrying two feeble wraiths bowling towards the gates of hell. I thought that my struggle to learn to drive despite Zemzem’s dream, which my grandmother interpreted as a warning to abandon the idea, had been a waste of time. For when I needed it to escape onto safe roads, it gave up in the face of the roadblocks all along the coast as far as Sidon. You told me that Alexander the Great was never so moved as when he had to take his leave of Sidon, with the color of its sea and the smell of its orange blossom, and I remember thinking at the time that this no longer meant anything when its asphalt was being pounded by huge Israeli army boots.
    When you didn’t open the door to me, I stared at its blank surface, listening to the hollow sound of my own insistent knocking. I swallowed and it felt as if my tongue had dropped into my guts. I guessed you were on the high seas, on one of the ships with hundreds of other fedayeen and I seemed to taste the sea’s salty water and choke on it. I rushed to the nearest sea I could find. Its water was colorless. I stared hard at it and looked along the horizon, but all I found there was heat and indifference. This is something that irritates me about the war: nature fulfilling its function without missing a beat. The waves continued to crash onto the same rocks, the spray boiled up and subsided. Only the sky was not its usual color, because so many bullets had been sown in it and it still bore the acrid traces of the farewell rounds fired on your behalf. You must have cursed these little hailstorms and ridiculed them, your eyes alighting briefly onthe boys eagerly collecting the spent bullets, or a boy alone catching baby fish in a plastic bottle, or another clutching a faded bouquet which he was trying to sell to the departing fighters or their friends and relations. But why do things appear more serious when we read about them in history books: “They were surrounded, so that the sea was the only escape route left to them”?
    I rushed to the football stadium, the collecting point. The ululation had stopped and grains of rice and broken flowers strewed the ground. I went home dejectedly. A picture of you sitting fiddling with your papers for ages before you burned them loomed large in my mind. I was beside you, pretending to read the newspaper, and you said to me, “I’m stupid. Have I really not learned my lesson yet? Not learned that things change? There were so many people strangling this place, and suddenly they find other hands at their own throats.”
    Perhaps because of your sudden burst of confidence in the future, you didn’t want to know what I had