A Good Land

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 explodes. It’s all too reminiscent of the events that preceded the civil war. I think you should come back here where it’s safe.’

I understand my father’s concern. The car bomb that killed the former prime minister shook the country and has since been followed by killings of other politicians and journalists brave enough to speak their minds. I’m beginning to see that political stability is not something we can ever take for granted here. Still, I have felt a growing stubbornness in me not so much to ignore what is going on but to keep going in spite of it.

‘Baba, the Lebanese aren’t going to start killing each other again,’ I try to reassure him. ‘The civil war is over for good and things will eventually settle down, I’m certain of that.’

Although in leaving Lebanon all those years ago my parents believed they were securing a better future for me, I find the fact that they now choose to remain in Australia without me more poignant than ironic, especially since they seem genuinely afraid for my safety, more affected by Lebanon’s ups and downs than those of us who live here could ever allow ourselves to be. I suspect also that there is a measure of guilt at play here, the sense so many Lebanese living abroad have that they have abandoned their country just when it needs them most.

I hear my father sigh.

‘I’ll never understand the hold Lebanon has over you,’ he says.

‘But you already do understand, baba,’ I protest. ‘In many ways, it was you and mama who passed it on to me.’

I do not think of myself as particularly defiant or brave. I have at times had to admit that in staying here I am only resigning myself to the inevitable, acknowledging a pull that I know I am unable to resist. And whenever I am challenged to provide an explanation for my actions, either by my parents or by my own misdirected musings, I hesitate. I am weak, I want to say to anyone willing to listen. This enthusiasm you think you see in me is only my heart wavering this way and that.

I see Margo for the first time a few months after my arrival in Beirut. She is on the stairwell of the building making her way slowly but deliberately up to the third floor. She stops and looks straight at me.

‘Hello,’ she says with a smile.

I nod, feeling ashamed that I have been caught staring.

‘My name is Margo,’ she continues. ‘We’re neighbours, you know. You must come and visit me soon. I live in the flat just above yours.’

I look closely at her, the way her head shakes a little as she speaks, her skin, pale and lightly powdered, pulling gently downwards at her chin. She is not Lebanese, I can tell, but I am not certain where she might come from.

‘Yes, I would like that,’ I say after clearing my throat. ‘I’m Layla, by the way.’

Arriving a few days later at the open landing of the third-floor flat with a bouquet of flowers in my hand, I stop to look up at the sky before knocking at the door and hearing Margo’s greeting.

Moments later, I am sitting in a deep blue armchair with my new friend on the floor opposite, her back against the sofa, her short legs stretched out on the carpet, pink felt slippers on her feet, and her ankles, covered in mottled skin, showing beneath the hem of beige corduroy trousers. Even at this first meeting, I see how important this friendship will be in my life, an anchor in a recurring storm.

Margo tells me she married an air force pilot who was killed over Germany during the war. A handsome young man of French aristocratic line, he chose her on a whim, she says, and later made her abort two pregnancies because he believed it was no time to bring children into the world.

I listen to her slow, accented English and watch closely as her grey eyes, small and surprisingly clear for her age, sparkle in the telling, her hair short and white and so thick it curls into clumps behind her rather large ears. The tremor in her voice means I have to listen very carefully to follow and as the lined skin of her face moves with her words she appears ageless, a kind of female Peter Pan, magical and only real when I want her to be.

Pronouncing the name of her husband in the French way, with a long vowel sound in the middle and a silent ‘n’, Margo says John had been the love of her life. That is why she never remarried after he was killed.

‘It was not so much that the men I met later in life were no match for him, you see. In fact, in many ways, one or two of them were better than my John, much kinder to me than he was.’

She pauses.

‘It was just that I could never bring myself to feel as much as I did with him, to go through that kind of intensity again with another human being.’

‘It must have been very difficult for you when you lost him,’ I say gently.

Margo nods.

‘But I managed, as most people did during those terrible times.’

She lifts her cigarette to her mouth and draws deeply on it, her lips pressed closely together over it in the manner of a committed smoker. When she finally lets out a cloud of smoke like a long sigh, I feel myself breathe again.

‘Surely after the war finally ended life was easier, Margo.’

‘I suppose we all felt relief that the end had come, yes, but things were difficult for a long while afterwards.’

She looks up at me with her heavy-lidded eyes.

‘I don’t mean just the physical deprivations, the food rationing and belt-tightening we had to do,’ Margo continues. ‘It was more that everyone was exhausted with the effort of surviving the war and people still had to cope with all of its consequences.’

I try to imagine what it must have been like, to have lost so much and been broken, to have to struggle to put yourself together again when all you really wanted to do was to curl up into yourself and wish existence away. I shake my head.

Margo gives me a questioning look.

‘Don’t look so worried, sweetheart,’ she says, laughing softly. ‘It’s all over now and things did work out in the end. Let’s have some more coffee.’

In spring, during the almost sub-tropical rains that fall over Beirut, I step into Margo’s apartment, shut the front door behind me and feel as though I can finally stop and gather the scattered parts of myself together again. In this sitting room and in this solid armchair, rain descending outside the partially opened window and chaos far behind me, I know I am accepted just as I am, lost and sometimes lonely and looking for answers that elude me.

Margo listens attentively, cigarette constantly in hand, her head shaking slightly or held to one side, her eyes blinking every now and then and her mouth making an ‘O’ of astonishment just at the right moment. And as time passes and the light in the room continues to tilt away from us, our faces falling into half-shadow, she manages to make me feel, imperceptibly and with the help of an occasional murmur, less needy somehow and worthy of her favour.

It will be some time before I will learn to interpret the nuances in her conversation or catch the subtle hints behind her deliberately pronounced words. But I know that the exchanges which will follow, suspended as they are with silences that let in intermittent sounds from the street below, will always be rich with layers of meaning, fragile things that I can only guess at and which I might later hope to understand.

Alone at night, I dream Margo’s stories, a long-drawn-out dream with a multitude of characters and Margo, her white hair luminous, her body youthful and strong. For a moment, we are interchangeable. I am Margo sixty years ago, a Resistance fighter in the Second World War in a field in France in the dead of night, the smells and sounds around me as sharp-edged as briars, my breathing heavy and filled with what feels like smoke, and in the distance a flickering light from a lone farmhouse, my heart hopeful and in my head the myriad thoughts that accompany nervous excitement.

She has told me of once parachuting face down in daylight onto a bush of thorns and lifting her head to watch a fine stream of blood trickle from her eyelid and onto the grass where each blade was magnified a thousand times until she could see a tiny forest of green and hear an immutable silence. That is when I finally understood, she said, how life is preciously small, its details, so often invisible, a kind of greatness, unremarkable acts of kindness ever present, even at the very worst of times.