Beirut Blues by Hanan al-Shaykh Page A

the whiskey as I sit watching you, and seem tense and out of sorts. I wish you would go back to being your old self. I don’t mean full of optimism, convincing yourself that the war is bound to take conflicting paths, that those guns are just noises, the fires colors, the black red, the dead merely statistics in newspapers. I just want the old Naser.
    I sit watching you, knowing that I am your newspaperand bringer of bad news. I have become your only link with the outside world, an owl screeching with foreboding, looking at you with unblinking eyes. I tell you about the people who have taken refuge on the stretch of beach off the Corniche between the British and American embassies, and about the rifles abandoned on the sands at the knees of a mother or wife in case a fighter comes back from the sea, about the backgammon tables, about how people are scrambling to get food, water, generators, and kerosene lamps. When I go on to describe an international football game, you explode: “I know. Do you think I’m deaf? What do you think all the radios in the neighborhood are for?”
    I grew to hate this task of mine, and so I didn’t tell you how committees and fronts were being formed to administer food supplies, baking, welfare clinics, publications, for you would have taken this as an indication of just how futile your efforts had been. I stopped going into detail about what I’d seen or felt. Your presence was a dead weight: every time I wanted to stay with you, you shocked me by your desire for your own company, and whenever I stayed at home I had the idea you were clutching onto me, even at a distance, so that I’d transmit some of my freedom to you. I wanted to be close to you, my longing for you flowing from me and coming to a halt in my fingertips. But your silence inhibited me from approaching you and I sat dumb and distant, reproaching you inwardly for not accepting me and sticking with me. I saw you as a grasshopper, never still, alighting here and there. I used to take off your shirt, which you hadn’t changed for a week, your trousers, your underpants, feeling your breathing on my neck. As you paced up and down like apanther shut up in a birdcage, I felt the weight of your body on mine. The words spilled out of you like foam and I nodded my head and closed my eyes.
    I was naïve to think I had become responsible for you. I used to keep quiet about what I’d heard and seen: the crowds out on the streets reminding me of feast days in my childhood; the games of chance people were playing. Are you staying or leaving? Are you going to live or die? Who will be the unlucky one this time? Or is this a lottery everybody loses?
    But you seemed to have been blessed with X-ray vision, for I arrived one day and sat on the couch, breathing heavily, closing my eyes, pretending to be tired, and instead of asking what had happened, you poured kerosene over your papers in the middle of the room, set light to them, and stood back and watched them disappearing in the flames. You remained motionless until the fire began to spread a little. I wanted to tell you about the fire my mother had caused at the time of my father’s death. I wanted to make you feel well disposed towards me so that you would forgive me for what I had thought on my way to see you. As I raced through Harj Beirut I had been confronted by tree stumps and charred embers instead of the dappled green canopy of pines. Sobbing, I continued on my way over the blackened road, thinking that perhaps the Palestinians ought to go; then the sky would not be full of Israeli aircraft leaving their mark on everything. I know. I know that if they went, you’d go with them. But I didn’t want Beirut to change so much that we no longer recognized it. Its skies were being transformed by the colored leaflets the Israelis dropped, dancing in the air, insteadof paper airplanes and clouds. But were they Israeli planes dropping leaflets from the sky, or “flights of birds striking us