Beirut Blues Read Free Page A

milk!”
    Suddenly I felt a longing for the old Hayat, but I was distracted by the sight of a building which looked like a white silkworm at the statue’s feet. “Is that the hospital attached to Saint Maroun’s convent?” I asked eagerly.
    When someone told me it was, my heart sank. “Poor Fadila,” I whispered.
    It must have come out louder than I thought, for Hayat’s mother asked, “Poor who?”
    Enthusiastically, as if I’d been waiting for the opportunity to express my silent thoughts, I burst out, “Fadila’s mother’s in Saint Maroun’s Hospital.” I had already guessed what was going on in the others’ minds: “Fadila. That’s an old-fashioned peasant name. Muslim.”
    Yvette asked curiously, “And her family’s there in West Beirut with you?”
    “They’re always crossing over and visiting her here,” I said.
    Inevitably Fadila cut straight through the noise and the handsome youth’s disturbing glances and was there with me.
    I had an image of her in her high-heeled gold sandals,with her pale complexion and the black aba thrown around her shoulders, begging me to let her come with me to the east, punctuating her words with movements of her plump hands and cracking the chewing gum between her teeth. I don’t know how she manages to appear in front of me every time I decide to visit my friends on the other side, urging me to take her with me so that she can see her mother. I refuse, and this only makes her more insistent. I offer excuses and she doesn’t listen, only groans and beats her breast, reproaching herself for not visiting her mother enough. She can no longer control the fear and agitation she feels when she travels alone in the eastern sector. Once she told us how, on a previous visit, she had opened a box of baklava and offered one to the taxi driver in an attempt to stop herself feeling scared, but he refused, saying, “ Merci. No thanks.”
    She searched for the pack of cigarettes she’d bought especially for the trip to make her look like a woman with power, and began blowing out smoke and coughing furiously. Then instead of cursing the devil as she normally did when she coughed, she began cursing Amal and Hizbullah, the Party of God, trying to involve the taxi driver. “I ask you, have you ever heard of anyone but us starting up a political party for the Lord?”
    When the taxi driver didn’t reply, she set about opening up a plastic bag, checking to see that her black aba was still stuffed in at the bottom, and took out a box of chocolates, which she offered, only to be refused again. She told herself that he must think they were poisoned, and he was right to be wary, because the two of them belonged to opposite sides of a divided city, which meant they were enemies and at warwith each other, and stories of spies operating between the two sides were on the increase. She was nervous and uncertain how to behave. She held out the pack of cigarettes, and when he reached out a hand to take one, she relaxed a little, but her fear returned when she suddenly realized that she could no longer hear the sound of car horns and that there was no other car in sight on the bumpy road. So she began describing the suffering which the people in the western sector were encountering in their daily lives, nearly weeping with fright, and because the driver’s only response was a brief shake of the head, she began telling him again how much she liked and trusted the Christians, how she’d refused to put her mother anywhere but Saint Maroun’s Hospital, regardless of the cost, which had risen to thirty dollars a day, or the distance, or the difficulty of crossing from the west into the east. “The hospitals in the western sector are chaos. They’re all crazy there!”
    The driver put his foot down and she was convinced he was about to kill her. He would tear her limb from limb and throw the pieces into a ditch. She’d rather he raped her if that was what he wanted. She’d let him do whatever