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There are stone benches at regular intervals, each shaped like a flat, squat S, and at the end of the pavement a blue iron balustrade that is bent and broken in places overlooking the sea. There are also tall palm trees planted in a long line on one side of the pavement with what look like burlap bags covering their underside, high up where the remaining leaves flutter in the wind. And if she turns her head to look across the street, beyond the central reservation where flowery shrubs lie almost flush against the deep, dark earth, she sees a number of high-rise buildings that had not been there before she left.
Along the water’s edge, fishermen stand in their plastic slippers on rocks covered in seaweed, their lines rising and falling with the movement of the sea. How many fish do they have to catch to make the effort worthwhile, Aneesa wonders?
A man on crutches walks up to her and stops to extend a box filled with coloured packets of chewing gum. She gives him some money and moves on. The poor have always been here. That is familiar, as is the smell of the sea, a murky, damp smell that is welcome after all the years away.
She reaches the end of the Corniche where the pavement becomes wider and curves around a bend in the road, and stops for a moment to watch as men make their way into a mosque across the street. They pass through a small gate, take their shoes off and enter at the front door to perform the noon prayer. Up ahead, between where she is standing and the buildings diagonally opposite, there is a wide two-way avenue crowded with beeping cars and pedestrians with umbrellas over their heads. Some of the trees planted in the central strip are high enough so that she cannot see through to the other side, but she can hear everything, life and her own heart, humming together.
These are the hours of her undoing, long and sleepless, solitary. She shades her eyes and reaches for the bedside lamp. When she lifts herself off the bed, her body shadowing the dim light, she lets out a sigh and shakes her head. Her dreams, gathering all her fears together in one great deluge until there seems to be no means of overcoming them, were once again of water, the images behind her eyes thick and overwhelming, her pulse quickening and then suddenly stopping in the base of her throat.
She tiptoes into the living room in bare feet, switches on the overhead light and stands still for a moment.
‘Aneesa,’ Waddad calls out from her bedroom. ‘Are you all right?’
‘I’m fine, mama. Go back to sleep now.’
Her mother coughs into the night.
‘Don’t stay up too late then, dear.’
Aneesa steps out on to the balcony. Beirut in early autumn: the nights are getting cooler though the air remains humid. She wraps her arms around her body and looks down on to the street where there is absolute quiet. She feels a sudden longing for permanence and certainty, for the hardiness she has seen in large oak trees in the West, unwavering and placid too. For a moment, as a breeze comes in from the sea, she wishes she could fly back with it to anywhere but here.
Months after her return, she is still unused to the feeling of always being in familiar places, indoors and out, as if enveloped in something almost transparent that moves with her, a constant companion. These streets, she thinks when she wanders through them, are a part of me, how familiar are the smells that emanate from them, fragrant and sour, the sun that shines or does not on their pavements, and when the rain falls I, umbrella in hand, mince my way through the water, through the cold.
The first letter arrived not long after Bassam’s car was found abandoned and empty in a car park not far from the airport. My mother saw the white envelope addressed to her on the doorstep when she opened the front door to put out the rubbish. She brought the envelope inside, and sat down heavily on her favourite kitchen chair before handing it to me. Open it, she said.
I tore open the envelope with trembling hands, pulled the letter out and began to read.
‘My darling mother. I cannot imagine how difficult it has been for you and Aneesa these past few weeks and I am sorry for it.’
I looked up at my mother and she nodded for me to continue.
I have already begun negotiating with my captors for my release. It’s a long process, mama, so it might be a while before I see you and my darling sister again. I do not know which part of the country we’re in but please don’t worry about me. I am well and getting plenty of food. I have even made friends with one of the guards here and he has agreed to take this letter for me. I cannot say much more and don’t know when I’ll be able to write again. I love you both very much.
I reached out and placed a hand on my mother’s shoulder. Bassam is alive, mama, I said.
She took the letter from me and put it back into the envelope. Then she stood up and began to pace across the kitchen floor.
He may have been alive when he wrote this but how do we know what’s happened to him since? my mother asked. The only way we’ll know that he’s still alive is if we see him again. And with that, she turned abruptly to the sink and began to wash the breakfast dishes.
When we were children, I used to place my hand on my brother’s forehead as he slept and try to will him to dream of a stronger, hero-like self, of the man he would be, until he woke up and pushed my hand away. Aneesa, what are you doing here in the middle of the night? Let me sleep now.
That moment in my mother’s kitchen, suddenly realizing that Bassam’s living and dying, both, were endless, our fears and hopes entangled between them, I shuddered.
Another letter, I murmured to my mother’s back. Another letter?
They drive south along the coast and then turn up into the hills east of Beirut. When they are halfway there, Aneesa stops the car and steps out to look at the view. The sun is shining, the sea is bright and blue, and the air is so much cleaner up here that she feels she is breathing freely for the first time since her return. She gets back into the car and realizes how much she has missed the mountains.
When they arrive at their destination, Waddad and Aneesa stand at the terrace’s edge and look down to the valley, into the distance. There are pine trees and gorse bushes and a soft haze in the air. Behind them are mountains of grey rock and fine, violet-coloured earth.
‘Shall we go into the shrine now, mama?’
‘We’ll have to put these on.’
Waddad opens her handbag and takes out two long white veils. Aneesa shakes out a mandeel, jerking it up suddenly so that it will not touch the floor. The delicate spun cotton flutters outwards. She places it on her head, throws its folds over one shoulder and takes a deep breath.
‘It smells so sweet.’ Aneesa smiles at her mother.
Waddad reaches for her daughter’s hand and the two women make their way to the shrine. They take off their shoes, placing them neatly outside the door before stepping into the large, square-shaped room.
Several people stand leaning against the iron balustrade around the shrine. Aneesa watches a woman who is kneeling, both her hands wrapped around the railing and her eyes squeezed tightly shut.
‘Let’s sit over there.’ Waddad motions towards quilted cushions placed over the large Persian carpet that covers the floor.
They move to one corner of the room and sit down, their legs tucked beneath them. Waddad places her hands on her thighs, stares straight ahead and begins to mutter softly under her breath. She has a serious look on her face and the edges of the mandeel rest open against her large ears. Aneesa tries to suppress a smile and fails.
Some moments later, a man tiptoes into the room in his socks. He must be taking a break from work, Aneesa thinks, because he is wearing navy trousers and a beige shirt that are dotted with dust and paint. He walks up to the shrine and pushes a folded banknote into the collection box hanging on the railing. He stands still for a moment and taps his roughened hand on the wooden box, while gazing at the shrine. Aneesa wonders what he is praying for and watches as he silently steals back out of the room. The kneeling woman is weeping quietly to herself. Aneesa stretches her legs out and coughs quietly. She feels her mother’s hand on her arm.
‘Shush, dear. I’m trying to concentrate,’ she whispers.
‘What on?’
Waddad presses her lips together and shakes her head. Moments later, she stands up.
‘Come on, Aneesa,’ she says, ‘let’s go.’
When they are back in the car, their heads bare and shoes on their feet, Aneesa and Waddad sit quietly for a moment.
‘I was praying for your brother’s soul,’ Waddad finally says.
‘What good does it do?’ Aneesa rolls down her window and lets in a cool breeze that touches their faces. She reaches a hand up to her hair, missing the feel of the veil around her head and on her shoulders.
‘What other choice do we have?’ Waddad asks.
Salah, when I first returned and would come upon strangers talking on a bus or in the street, I could not tell whether they had just met or had known one another a lifetime. The gestures were always the same, the words delivered up close, voices loud, hands moving wildly, touching shoulders or arms or the tops of dark heads. I could not believe at first how distant I had become in my years in London, how cool compared to the heated passions that I found here. Then there was the open curiosity and warmth in people’s eyes; neighbours and acquaintances who looked closely at me until I thought I would burn under their gazes. Who are you now? they seemed to be saying to me. What do you make of us after all this time? And I sometimes wanted to walk up to them, perhaps put a hand on a listening shoulder, and say I was sorry for having left them for so long.
The first time you and I met at the bus stop around the corner from my flat in London, I wanted to tell you my story because there seemed something familiar about you. You were perched next to me under the awning and stared, not rudely but in a curious way, as if you saw something recognizable in me too.
When I spoke, you blushed and lifted a trembling hand to smooth back the white hair on your elegant head.
I told you my name and you said: Aneesa, the kind and friendly one. It seemed understandable then that you spoke Arabic and that we were natural companions. You reached out to shake my hand and told me your name and for a moment, as we held on to each other amidst the crowd, it was as though we were the only two people standing there, on a grey day when sunlight was not a possibility.
They sit on the top deck of the number nine bus headed for a leafy suburb. This is their second trip there and Salah has on his lap a bagful of stale bread.
Salah is in his suede jacket and Aneesa has on a new plaid cloak with slits on either side for her arms to go through.
‘I didn’t think you’d be willing to come out in this weather,’ Salah turns and says.
The windows have misted over from the rain and cold and the bus is moving slowly through the traffic.
Aneesa reaches over and pulls the window open slightly to let the fresh air in.
‘What does Samir think of our excursions?’ she asks.
Salah looks startled at her question and shrugs his shoulders.
‘Doesn’t he ever ask you what you do with your time while he’s at work?’
‘I suppose we don’t talk very much, my son and I,’ Salah says.
They look out of the window again, down at the rows of semi-detached houses and at the figures on the pavement carrying umbrellas and wrapped up in coats and heavy rainwear. Aneesa pulls her cloak more tightly around herself.
‘When I first came here, I’d always ride upstairs on the buses,’ she says.
By the time the bus reaches the end of the line, Aneesa and Salah are the only passengers. They make their way down the winding steps, Salah opening his large umbrella once they are in the street. They huddle beneath it and walk briskly towards the park where they stand beneath the empty branches of a large tree by the water, both reaching into the plastic bag at the same time. Aneesa breaks the bread into small pieces, throws them into the pond and watches as noisy ducks and geese move effortlessly into the water towards them. Once Salah and Aneesa have thrown all the bread into the water and the bag is finally empty, the birds turn their backs and pedal furiously towards the other edge of the pond.
‘Let’s sit on the bench there,’ Aneesa says, pointing just beyond the tree.
‘It may be wet.’ Salah opens up the umbrella again.
‘Don’t worry, this cloak is waterproof. We’ll be fine.’
Salah chuckles, puts the plastic bag on the bench and they sit down on it.
The rain has turned into a fine drizzle and a low fog covers the park, somehow intensifying the quiet. Suddenly, they hear song rising from the other side of the pond. The male voice, strong and tender, expertly meanders in and out of the unfamiliar melody, enveloping them in its beauty. Aneesa cannot make out the words to the song and when she turns to look at Salah, his eyes are opened wide with astonishment. She reaches out to him. They sit, gloved hands held tightly together, their breath floating back into the music and the mist.
‘When your father collapsed at work, it was Bassam who told me about it,’ Waddad says, looking at Aneesa to make sure she is listening. ‘He was only fifteen. He came in carrying heavy shopping bags. I was just pleased at the time that he’d thought to get the groceries.
‘While I was emptying the bags in the kitchen, I found a bottle of flower water among the things. I couldn’t think why he’d bought it. I’d never known him ask for anything like that.’
Waddad is sitting on Aneesa’s bed. She looks down and pulls at her nightgown. It is white and much too large for her small frame.
‘He seemed irritated when I asked him about it and said I should know that he liked it in his rice pudding.’ Waddad looks up at Aneesa again and blinks. ‘He always hated rice pudding, even as a child.’
Aneesa leans against the headboard of her bed, her eyes half-closed with tiredness, and waits for her mother to continue.
‘Then I realized later, after Bassam told me about your father, when he poured the flower water on a handkerchief and placed it over my face to revive me, I realized that he’d bought it for me all along.’
My mother’s search for Bassam began soon after my departure. It took her to distant corners of the city, through streets where the buildings rested close against one another, and the people moved shoulder to shoulder, jostling for space. She climbed up endless stairways, knocking on doors, sipping cups of coffee and waiting to hear a sign of recognition at her story.
I wish I could help you, friends and strangers said. May Allah give you all the strength you need to endure this great sorrow.
She heard about an organization set up by families of the missing and went to one of their meetings. They sat in a small room in an apartment not far from the city centre. There were many of them, men and women, young and old, all with the same anticipatory look in their eyes, as if their loved one might suddenly appear to hold and reassure them, as if the answer lay in talking to each other, in making words of their loss and weaving the uncertainty into the stories of their lives. When it was my mother’s turn to speak, she shook her head and stepped determinedly out of the room muttering under her breath, I am not one of them. This is not my place.
She went to the police station in her area and asked to see the officer in charge. He gave her a cup of unsweetened coffee and listened politely until she finished speaking, then he opened a drawer in his dilapidated old desk and took out a ream of paper. I have here a list of all the people who have gone missing in this war, he said. Their families are all desperate for news, just like you, but all I can do is write names down and put them away again.
It was then, dear Salah, that she noticed how tattered his uniform looked. The grey material was frayed at the edges and the buttons down the front of his jacket did not match.
When she finally decided to go and and see the leader of the community, a politician, at his mountain palace, my mother had not yet given up hope.
He looked younger than she had thought he would and kept shifting restlessly in the seat of his armchair. She confided in him her worst nightmare. I just want to know, Waddad said, I want to know what happened. Even if he’s never coming back, I need to know what happened to him.
The man only shook his head and she sensed that he might be getting impatient with her.
You must try to forget him, he declared, leaning forward and putting a hand on her arm. It all happened a long time ago. Why don’t you busy yourself with some charity work? If you like children, we’re always looking for help at our community centres.
Once outside, Waddad walked into the palace courtyard and sat on one of the stone steps that surrounded it. She listened to the water from the garden fountain slapping against the marble slabs at its outer edge, wrapped her cardigan more tightly around her and whistled softly to herself.
I imagine that my mother knew then that there was not much she could do about other people’s obstinacy except take it on her own shoulders. Maybe it was that moment in the palace courtyard when her anger had suddenly abandoned her and she felt so bereft that she realized she had been looking in all the wrong places and suddenly knew exactly what she must do.
‘Are you working, dear?’ Waddad asks.
Aneesa is sitting at the dining table with a large Arabic–English dictionary and the document that she is attempting to translate before her.
‘I can’t seem to concentrate on work today,’ she says, looking up at her mother.
Waddad is standing by the sofa, one hand against the back of it, and is running her fingers through her short hair with the other. She is dressed in her daily uniform of jeans and T-shirt.
‘Tell me, mama. What made you change your look so drastically?’
Waddad gives a little grunt.
‘It’s more practical this way. No wasting time over hairdressers and dressmakers. Besides, you get used to it eventually.’
Aneesa shakes her head.
‘But what possessed you to have your hair cut so short?’
‘You don’t like it?’
Aneesa looks closely at the elfin face. It is long and tired-looking in places but seems self-contained and there is a certain fire in the eyes that she remembers seeing in Bassam’s face sometimes. Aneesa feels a shudder go through her body.
‘Yes, I do, mama,’ she says quietly, returning to her work. ‘I like it very much.’
There are days when Aneesa thinks that if she could only concentrate hard enough she could make herself forget for hours at a time that there is a war raging around them. As it is, she can only manage a few moments of peacefulness before her mind interrupts it and she is aware of the presence of violence all around her.
To her mother, and at moments like these, Aneesa speaks harshly and with impatience as if it were up to Waddad to change things, to bring Father back and get them out of the chaos in which they now find themselves.
‘At least take us up to the house in the village,’ Aneesa shouts at Waddad during a particularly vicious battle between militias a few streets away from their block of flats. ‘We’ll be safer there.’
The two of them are sitting in the corner of the kitchen away from the main road.
‘I’m not leaving Bassam here in Beirut and you know there’s no way he would come up to the mountains,’ Waddad replies with determination in her voice.
‘So we have to put up with this because he’s foolish enough to want to stay here?’
Aneesa stands up abruptly and moves her hand away when Waddad tries to pull her down again. Moments later there is a sudden lull in the fighting and they hear the front door being opened. Waddad stands up from her crouching position as Bassam walks into the kitchen.
‘Where have you been?’
‘Are you two all right?’ Bassam asks them and goes to Waddad. ‘Sit down, mama, please. The fighting has stopped for now. You too, Aneesa. Sit down.’
Aneesa saw Bassam leaving the house hours before the fighting began while her mother was out getting the groceries. She knows he will not tell them where he really was no matter how persistent Waddad is in her questions. She decides to steer the conversation clear of any potential argument and reaches for her mother’s hand.
‘I’m sorry for shouting at you,’ Aneesa says quietly.
‘It’s all right, habibti. We were both afraid.’
Waddad pats Aneesa’s hand but she is looking intently at Bassam. Her brother sits down.
‘Everything is going to be fine,’ he says. ‘We’ll be fine.’
He puts a hand on Aneesa’s hair and smooths it back, then he sits back in his chair and sighs.
A rush of wind follows him when he steps outside and Aneesa closes her eyes as he walks past. The front door slams firmly after him and she is left with an impression of a pair of startled eyes and a sense of anxiety. She takes a deep breath.
Salah is standing beside her. His hand on her arm, he leads her inside. They walk slowly through the large house with windows long as doors and elaborate colour schemes in every room.
‘Was that Samir?’ she finally asks.
Salah nods.
‘I didn’t get a chance to introduce you,’ he says. ‘He couldn’t stay.’
They sit on stools at an island in the middle of a kitchen painted in warm yellow. The colour makes Aneesa think of sunlight beaming through half-open doorways. A beautiful floral tea set is laid out on the counter. Salah pushes a plate filled with neatly cut squares of semolina cake towards her.
‘Thank you,’ Aneesa says, taking a piece of the cake and biting into it. ‘This is his house, isn’t it?’
Salah begins to pour the tea.
‘My son brought me here from Beirut after his mother’s death. He said he didn’t want me to be on my own.’ He passes Aneesa a cup of tea. ‘You don’t take sugar, do you?’ Salah asks.
Aneesa shakes her head and sips at the hot tea. It is strong and satisfying.
‘Maybe I’ll meet him next time I come,’ she says.
‘Sometimes, you know,’ Salah continues, ‘I think he’s lonelier than I am.’
She wakes to dreaming, images, faint and gleaming, trailing before her, the colours of her childhood, shades of blues and greens and the warm, nascent yellows of hope. And as she closes her eyes once again, attempting to recapture the clarity of this sudden awareness, of the long journey into the self, she sees herself again and again in the company of those she has loved.
The places they find themselves in are always familiar and magnificent: a sprawling Mediterranean villa in the sun; an old stone house surrounded by tall trees; or a grand home spread over dark red earth, dusty, mysterious and wonderful. The sensation that accompanies the dreams is the same every time: a kind of halting, surprised happiness that threatens to overwhelm her so that she turns to describe it to someone but finds herself suddenly alone.
She wakes up bewildered, wondering where it is all coming from and it is only when she turns on the light by her bed and she realizes she is once again in Beirut that the ghosts of daylight return.
My mother became certain she would find Bassam at the orphanage in the mountains. During her first visit, she asked the directress if she could do volunteer work with the children. After that, she went there twice a week in the afternoons and either supervised the younger ones in the playroom or helped the elementary school children during their study hour. She especially enjoyed the time in the playroom with the younger ones and brought along new toys from time to time. She spent many hours with the children on the floor playing with the farm animals or building high towers with multi-coloured bricks. Sometimes she had a particular project organized and asked all the children to participate in it. They did cardboard cut-outs of a mountain village, complete with houses, trees and prickly bushes, and used some of the animals they already had, placing them among the buildings and stones.