The Fragrant Garden

                                 

                                                        
Published in
Hikayat: Short Stories by Lebanese Women [Telegram books, London, 2006]
Lebanon Through Writers’ Eyes [Eland, London, 2009].


We sat in the garden, an anomaly in this city of unruly concrete invaded by trash. Gemmayzeh, just beyond the Beirut city center, had been too close to the demarcation line during the war. As a result, the area had been left pretty much to its own devices during the fifteen years of war. While the war raged, the hundred-year-old alleys and traditional Lebanese houses were abandoned, or occupied by cowering people, who had nowhere else to go. The rebuilding that immediately followed the war caught up slowly with this quaint neighborhood.
Some of the old houses had been rehabilitated by an enterprising woman who was keen to preserve what was left of her Beirut, and turned into expensive villas for rent. We were invited to the home of some friends who lived in that area overlooking Gemmayzeh. We found them sitting in the garden with some guests. It was a lovely October evening. The jasmine was still in bloom and the air was heavy with the scent.
As was often the case when Beirutis got together, the conversation somehow managed to turn to the war years, even though the war had ended some 25 years before.
“The other day my daughter asked me if the war had left any scars,” said a lawyer who had lived part of the war in Tripoli and had spent some time in Paris. “Their teacher had been talking to them about post traumatic stress disorders, about the lost generation…”
“What did you tell her?” asked an attractive woman in her 50s who was a sculptor.
“I was taken aback by the question, actually. I didn’t think that I was scarred. And then my daughter asked me a curious question. ‘What about Teta, your mother. Did the war affect her?’ And suddenly, I started to weep. My mother had died, and I had not been able to attend her funeral. I had never come to terms with that.”
“I feel like I wasted my youth…” said the sculptor, “I still can’t account for those 15 years of war, or even the years that have followed. Many of my friends never married, and this in a culture where women marry young.” She turned toward me, “Where were you during the war?”
“I lived in Beirut throughout.”
“Here in Gemmayzeh?”
“No, I lived in West Beirut. I moved here after I got married. The war had ended.”
“I went to Paris soon after the war started,” said our hostess. “I couldn’t risk staying. My son was just born, and my husband’s work could as easily be conducted from Paris, so… but tell me, was it really a horrible time throughout?”
I thought for a moment. “There was much that was terrible, yes, but yet, in an odd way, there was something about the experience that was singular. I have never lived as intensely as I did during the war.”
“Intensely?”
“Perceptions were heightened, experiences were more vivid. I can’t explain it. I felt I was really alive. I wrote - mostly poems that were compact expressions of what was happening. I looked forward to going to school and to being with the kids I taught. There was an exhilaration to our every day lives… I have not felt that way since the war ended.”
My husband added, “I remember the summer of 1989. I was one of the few people left in Beirut. My wife’s family had gone to the US and had left me the key to their apartment, on the 6th floor of a building in Zarif. I offered to feed the cat and water the plants while they were away. My sister and her family had gone to the North, and she had left me the key to her place on the 7th floor of a building about a 10-minute walk from the Zarif apartment. She, too, had a cat. I lived on the 11th floor of a building in Kraytem, about a half hour away from both houses. By then the war had gone on for 14 years and in spite of being a Maronite, continuing to live in West Beirut was the only choice for me.
The shelling that summer ravaged the city. Fuel was scarce, and basic amenities were unavailable. I had developed a ritual. I would climb down the 11 floors of my building, walk to the Sporting beach club, and swim for an hour. There was no power most of the time, so the elevators did not work. The beach was also a good place to take a shower, albeit with brackish water, since there was no running water in most of Beirut. Occasionally I would play chess with some of the regulars there. Mostly I would don my mask and flippers and go skin-diving, relishing the submersion into the dim and muffled quiet of the Mediterranean.
In the afternoon I would walk to my sister’s house- there was very little fuel and taxis were a luxury. I would climb up the seven floors to her apartment and feed her cat, then walk down the seven floors and head toward Zarif to do the same there. Then I would take the thirty-minute walk back to my building and climb up the eleven floors. We developed different ways to make the trek up the stairs easier. Keeping a steady slow pace helped preserve energy. I also discovered that counting backwards how many floors were left rather than how many I had climbed, was somehow more encouraging.
In the evening, I would meet my neighbor, a gnarled, gruff Sunni who worked at the port of Beirut, on the landing between our two apartments. The landing was the safest place to be as we were separated from the outside by three walls.”
Conventional wisdom in wartime Beirut held that shells usually penetrated one wall, sometimes two. The landings of buildings, like underground garages, were the community centers of wartime Beirut. People who barely acknowledged each other in peace time, found themselves spending long, intimate evenings together, united in the need for preservation and survival.
“My neighbor and I found we had a lot in common and had long discussions over a bottle of whisky in the dim light of a battery-powered lamp. He would tell his friends confidentially that he really liked that Maronite neighbor of his, ‘an excellent young man, were it not for his name!’” The guests in the garden chuckled. My husband’s name literally means ‘The Maronite.’
He continued, “Funny thing about all this is that when the horror of the shelling stopped, and a cease-fire was agreed upon that eventually led to the end of the war, I was miserable. Many of the people who had stayed behind had the same reaction. Instead of feeling relieved or overjoyed, I was discomfited, lost. People started coming back from wherever they had taken refuge, and normal life resumed. I couldn’t take it. My space was being invaded by all these people who returned from cities where normalcy was taken for granted. They had no idea what every shell hole in the wall or pothole in the street meant. The pace of life quickened and became banal. Life became busy again. It actually made me nauseous.”
Our host shook his head, “and here we are twenty-five years later still coming to terms with this war which touched us all.”
The delicate jasmine blooms shivered in the fall breeze, wrapping us in the perfume that only Beirut jasmines give out. The white flowers fell gently into our laps while we sat in silence in that anachronism of a garden.

                                                    Mishka Mojabber Mourani                                   Revised Fall 2016