I came back to take a job as a lecturer in English literature at the American University, feeling safe in the knowledge that I once again belonged somewhere that mattered. Yet now that I have been here for some time, living the uncertainties that we all have to face, I am sometimes less sure of my intentions than I had been as a young girl, as though my initial resolve had dissipated over time, leaving me with a yearning that I can no longer clearly understand.
There are times when, unable to sleep, I put on my slippers, wrap a shawl around myself and tiptoe up the stairs to the upper landing where the lights of the city flicker through the dark. I lean over the concrete banister and sniff at the air and imagine I hear the sounds of Beirut calling to me, soft whispers that rise from the sea and then gently float up into the waiting sky, memories of a past I cannot leave behind.
The morning after the assassination, I sense a stir in the building and go out onto the landing to find out what is happening.
‘They’re taking the remains for burial in downtown Beirut,’ a neighbour tells me as he’s going down the stairs.
‘Where from?’ I ask him.
‘From his villa up the road,’ he shouts up the stairwell.
I go back into the apartment, grab my handbag and rush outside again. Once on the street, I am surprised by the number of people who are walking singly or in groups in the direction of Hariri’s home. Despite the crowds, everything seems eerily quiet. I eventually find myself being pushed along by the swarm behind a coffin hoisted onto the shoulders of a group of young men and draped with a large Lebanese flag. I recognize two of the bearers as Hariri’s sons. An ambulance inches its way ahead of us and I wonder when the men will tire and have to relinquish their burden to it.
As we move slowly forward into the neighbourhoods that lead into Beirut’s downtown, people continue to join us. Soon, I can no longer see the coffin. I look up at the buildings on either side of the road. The balconies are crowded with onlookers, some of whom are waving at the throng. Again, I am struck by the despondent mood that surrounds me. Passions usually run high at funerals in this country but everyone here seems subdued with grief. The silence only serves to heighten the ominous nature of the occasion.
I lose my footing and stumble before managing to pick myself up again. For a moment, as I look down to regain my balance, I notice some of the shoes worn by those walking next to me. Elegant feet in precariously high-heeled boots next to a pair of well-worn, fake leather lace-ups in an ugly shade of mustard; white trainers with their instantly recognizable logo alongside two very grubby feet in plastic slippers that make a slapping noise as they move. I lift my head and blink with astonishment. Although popular among much of Lebanon’s upper classes, Hariri has never struck me as a man of the people. Yet here we apparently are, rich, poor and everything in between, marching at his funeral.
On the outskirts of Martyrs’ Square where the politician and others killed in the explosion will be buried, hundreds of thousands of people are already gathered. The atmosphere here seems different, less restrained. I feel myself being forced forward by the crowd and, in my rising panic, grab onto a street lamp to steady myself. I climb up onto the low ledge at the base of the lamp and take a look around for a way out.
A short distance to the left of me, Druze sheikhs in their long, navy-blue robes and white-and-red headdresses walk past. Right behind them are Christian Maronite priests, their heads bowed and large brass crosses swinging round their necks. They have come from the mountain villages east of Beirut where the two communities have lived together for hundreds of years. Where are the Muslim clerics? I wonder. As if on cue, a group of Muslim sheikhs approach from the distance. They are in long robes too and move in unison, like a rolling wave, many with their arms crossed in front of their chests. From their headdresses, I can tell that there are both Sunnis and Shiites among them.
I hear shouts from the crowd up ahead and try to make out what is being said. The chanting catches on and soon everyone around me seems to be shouting for a free and independent Lebanon. I am not surprised. Until recently, the Israeli army had occupied the whole of southern Lebanon for nearly thirty years, and the thousands of Syrian troops who came here in the early stages of the civil war have still not left. This has not been a truly sovereign nation for decades. I realize that my own anger and frustration at the undue influence neighbouring countries have over Lebanon are being echoed here. And while I cannot bring myself to join in the political slogans, I begin to see that this sad occasion is providing an opportunity for all of us to express how we feel about the continued presence of foreign troops in our country.
I step down and take a deep breath. The dread at being so tightly surrounded by people has suddenly left me. We are united, I think quietly to myself, before allowing myself to be swept away once again by the crowd.
The university is built on a hillside overlooking the Mediterranean and boasts all the trees and plants that disappeared long ago from other parts of Beirut. Pines, palms and chestnut trees, sweet-smelling frangipanis, azalea bushes, delicate camellias, rhododendrons that produce huge pink and blue blossoms in spring and bougainvillea that turns a brilliant purple, a feast for the eyes. All this and swathes of greenery too, lawns and evergreen shrubs, rubber plants and gorse bushes; and then the eternal backdrop of the azure sea that stretches horizons so far one senses release at the end of it.
My office is in one of a number of two-storey stone buildings with red rooftops that dot the campus. It is small with laden bookshelves lining its walls, and is almost overwhelmed by a heavy, battered desk that has served many other lecturers before me. By the window, only a few inches from the door, is an old armchair that I sit in when I am reading or merely want to think, looking out now and then at the greenery or at students stopping to chat or walking to and from their classes. At times, I lean back in the armchair and close my eyes for a moment and, breathing in the silence around me, try to picture the me that came before this, the promise that brought me back to this city of light and shadows.
When I was a child, my mother told me stories that she made up as I sat in bed waiting to fall asleep. They were not fantastical tales, but described the adventures of a little girl who, like me, lived with her parents in Ras Beirut in an apartment not far from the sea. Eventually, I took on the role of storyteller too, adding details to mama’s accounts of the girl’s life, changing an ending whenever I felt it needed it and seeing myself as the heroine of an unyielding imagination. My father, on the other hand, bought me books, sat me in his lap and, opening them carefully, read out the title and the writer’s name before moving on to the story itself, anticipation in his lilting voice. I would look at the illustrations as he read and run a finger along the lines of words in wonder, and feel them swirl around in my head like clouds in the wind.
There are times when I think the two notions of storytelling and books have forever become muddled up in my mind. Even as I grew and eventually learned to read, I still thought of books not as words on paper that needed to be deciphered, but as something alive and malleable, stories which I had in one way or another inspired, at least in part, and which could change depending on how I chose to understand them. Now, when I read, I cannot shake off the feeling that I am somehow part of the process, an element of a wheel that turns and in constantly turning creates movement where there might otherwise be stillness, dreams up the stories of my own uneven existence.
I speak to my parents on the telephone and long to be engulfed once again by the green and peppery scents of Australia, by its white, expansive shores and a sky above so vast that it is easy to lose oneself in it.
‘No, I am not lonely, habibti,’ I tell my mother. ‘It’s impossible to feel loneliness here, life is much too immediate.’
‘But the situation…’
‘The Syrian troops have finally withdrawn, mama, and things are quiet again. People have to get on with their lives regardless of the political mayhem around them. Please don’t worry about me. I’ll be fine.’
‘All these assassinations are very worrying,’ my father says once he gets on the phone. ‘Things may get worse, Layla. Syria might retaliate and Israel certainly won’t sit idly by if the situation