Beirut Blues Read Free

warmth brought me back, his eyes saying to me, “Let me take you under the olive trees and kiss you.”
    I no longer looked him in the eye. I began to feel embarrassed every time he opened his mouth to recite a verse, even though the females in his poems were always in the plural.
The newlyweds have gone tonight and left me with the pearls
My heart beats faster, but I tell it to be still.
You could have had those pearls
And now they’re lost to you forever.
    I wished I could cling to him under the trees, rest my head on his chest, and say to him, “My heart’s beating too. If you hold my hands, I’ll faint. Has it been a long time? Yes, ages since anyone stared at me and flirted with me like this. And even longer since anybody invited me to the movies or a restaurant by the sea to walk and talk and be frivolous. Here there are movie theaters and restaurants on the seafront, but tomorrow I have to cross back into the west, or if not tomorrow the day after, or in a week at the most. To tell you the truth, I don’t feel as if I’m in my own country. I’m a tourist. It’s too late. But I didn’t always think like this. There were times before when I used to say the war had given some meaning to my life. Now I realize that it’s too late. I can’t open my heart to you. Just for one night? It’s not because you’re a Christian, but because tomorrow we’ll be separated, and you won’t be in a hurry to visit the western sector. Perhaps you’ve convinced yourself that I’m from here, because you’ve been drinking and I’m a friend of Hayat’s, and probably like me and Hayat, you don’t think of yourself as being from the east or the west. But I’ve grown full of suspicions. People are changing before my eyes. People I used to know when they were students have become professors and gone backwards a hundred years. They’ve taken sides. The time may come when I do the same! Who knows? Perhaps then I’ll be happy. Belonging to some faction, howeverextreme or outlandish, might be preferable to this. If you make a commitment, however hard the consequences turn out to be, you can relax. The fanatic meets a lot of others like him, people he can operate with. Where I come from, they hate everyone from your sector, even the men at the checkpoint. But I always want to have a chat with them, make them laugh and flirt with me. I seem to need reassurance and affection from your people. I want things to be like they were years ago. But now I’m drunk. All I want now is to rest my head on your chest.”
    His eyes bored into me, but thinking about what I would say in response to them made me miserable for a few moments, then I felt the warmth in his voice again, and admired his teeth which were revealed each time he laughed and joked with Yvette: “I’d give anything to hold your hand, to kiss you on the mouth. No, on second thoughts, maybe you’ve got no teeth. Okay, on the cheek.”
    “If you feel like it, you can have a nice whiff of meat,” she replied. “Come on! I’ve been pounding meat for kibbeh since early morning.”
    Everyone burst out laughing at her reply and the boy was encouraged to take this humorous flirtation further, so he asked her to have another drink with him. He held a full glass to her lips but she pushed it away. “My teeth are hurting me and my throat’s burning.”
    He plucked a piece of ice from the glass, but she moved her face out of reach, still laughing. “For Saint Maroun’s sake, please, my throat’s burning!”
    “Look, Saint Maroun’s asleep now,” he answered. “See,he’s got his eyes shut. So would you if you had to stand up all the time.”
    Saint Maroun? I realized the illuminated statue down below us, which I had always thought was Christ, must be their Saint Maroun.
    “Saint Maroun!” You drew in your breath, remembering. “I was so afraid of him! My grandmother, Umm George, used to threaten me with stories of what he’d do to me if I didn’t drink up all my