Beirut Blues Read Online Free PDF

couldn’t take much more of me and had begun to wonder if I was serious. Still hunched over the mosaic, I attempted to justify my request by giving him the impression that I knew someone who could return it to its original state for nothing.
    “Money’s not the problem. But it’s an impossible task, unless you find someone with the patience of Job. And you know, madam, what people are like these days.”
    Then he went over to the table, pulled open a drawer, and took out a bundle of pictures. He leafed quickly through them and handed me one of the three women looking just as I’d imagined them; their hair was flying out behind them with an ethereal quality, their breasts were small and beautiful, and the bunches of grapes between each one made an almost physical impact. I admit that I had decided not to buy a mosaic at all when I saw them piled up there. I thought that it was a crime for them to adorn strange, foreign walls. From time to time I find myself criticizing everything that Lebanese expatriates do, and you’re one now. In an attempt toescape from the mosaics without buying one, I forced myself to recall an episode which upset both of us.
    Do you remember the pretty mother with her husband and children getting out of a car to choose some ancient stones from the fort at Beit Mary? The children were pointing and shouting. “That one, Mom. No, that one,” as if they were on an Easter egg hunt, while her husband stood there, pleased to see his children enjoying themselves and waiting for his wife to decide so that he could lift the stones in his strong arms, as if they were children’s toys.
    You shouted at them to leave the stones or else, but the woman didn’t look in our direction, even when we rolled some little pebbles down towards them. The husband finished carrying off the stones, deaf to threats. You took the number of their car as they brushed the dust off their hands and drove away, with part of the fifth century in their trunk next to the can of oil and the spare tire.
    I defended you to myself as I remembered the episode, recalling your face with affection. I thought of them selling stalactites like ice cream at the cave of Qadisha. Then I decided that if I bought you a piece of mosaic, it would have been saved from damnation as far as you were concerned and I’d be doing a service to history and art.
    The mosaic and your aba have begun to play games with me. Every time the fighting stops for a while I can look at them in a normal fashion again and imagine Ali taking them out the door, once I’ve packed them and written your name and address on them. But as soon as the fighting starts again, I wonder what those unfamiliar objects are and what they’re doing there. This has been going on for three days, duringwhich time I’ve hardly left my bed and refuse even to hide in the hallway or the neutral seclusion of the storeroom.
    Despite the calm which has descended on me, I confess the explosions have dislodged my head from its moorings. I lie down a lot of the time and begin to postpone everything, even going to the toilet, and am thinking of getting a portable one like Fadila’s uncle. He sold flowers in the street, and didn’t move from his corner in her house all night, insisting it was too cold. At dawn he would hurry down to the entrance to move his flowers out into the street, his improvised chamber pot hidden behind him. “Flowers need sun and they have to breathe,” he would mutter.
    “Your pisspot needs sun and air too,” Fadila would shout after him.
    Lying down eases the ringing in my ears, helps me put up with my grandmother and Zemzem, and makes night blend into day so that time slips by. But it no longer interests me to follow the warring factions and put them into categories. So while I’m in this state, or rather the city is, it’s hard for me to work out my feelings with any degree of clarity. “We might as well be dead. The Syrians are entering Al-Dahiya,” says Zemzem,