An Unsafe Haven. Nada Jarrar Awar
we stayed out so late that our father would come looking for us, he continues, calling out to each of us by name in such a beautiful, deep, sing-song voice that we would hide further in the bushes, out of sight, just to listen to it.
—The way you describe it, Baba, Hannah tells him, it’s not difficult for me to imagine what it was like for you, the joy in that freedom.
Faisal pauses before going on.
—This building is located on the same site where your uncles and I used to play but it was not put up until years later. The moment I saw the foundations being dug, I was determined to live in it, although I was still a student at university at the time and couldn’t possibly afford the rent. As soon as I got myself a decent job, I took this apartment and brought your mother here after we were married. Eventually, of course, we were able to buy it and really call it home. He sighs. Life was simpler then, you know. There was more cohesiveness between communities and Beirut seemed much smaller because even when people did not know one another, they were at least familiar with each other’s families.
During her almost daily visits to her father, with every telling of these now familiar stories, Hannah finds herself searching for details that she might have previously missed, for the one element that could change her perception of the whole and bring greater clarity with it. What she seeks is not so much to understand the everyday history of this city that came before, but rather to picture it plainly in her mind’s eye and so commit herself to its past, to make for herself tangible memories of another Lebanon, a country built on hope and expectations of better times to come, a home that lived in the hearts and minds of its people.
She has some clear memories of life in Beirut as a child, before the outbreak of civil war and the family’s consequent escape to Cyprus, memories that are mostly associated with her family, and with her mother especially, young and lovely, her clean scent and dark hair shining. She remembers the way her mother would put out a hand for hers just before they went out, the feel of those soft fingers and, when she looked down, their beautifully manicured nails. As they walked then, Hannah trying desperately to keep up with her mother’s long strides, the streets of Beirut seemed to reflect the buoyancy they both felt, the glowing in their hearts.
Once, accompanying her mother on a visit to the home of friends, Hannah had found herself in an enormous living room, the sea – beyond luminous in the sun – framed by the huge window at one end of it. She saw waves that peaked in white and dipped down again into the blue, light bouncing on water and, in the distance, the long line of horizon glimmering, turning pale as it edged towards the sky so that Hannah felt herself lifted into it as she stood, hands leaning against the glass, her tiny body tilting towards the view, melting into it.
There had been family trips to the mountains where Hannah’s aunt Amal and her family spent their summers in a stone house that on one side overlooked terraces of pistachio trees and on the other abutted a hill covered in brambles. Lunch was eaten around a large table placed beneath the shade in the front garden: salads, stews and vegetables stuffed with rice and nuts, and raw meat pounded until tender, wrapped in mountain bread and dipped in seasoning. Afterwards, Hannah and her two cousins – her brother Sammy was an infant still – would tear squares off cardboard boxes they had found in the kitchen and carry them up the hill to a plateau midway on the mountain, high enough that the house looked no bigger than a matchbox but was visible still, and would sit on the cardboard and slide all the way down again, red dirt flying, arms and hearts thrown asunder.
These images, though vivid, are so fragile, so quick now to escape her even as she tries to recall them, that making of them a complete and satisfying picture seems impossible nowadays. In conversation with her father and other elderly relatives, and during moments of solitary contemplation, she fears that Lebanon, tired and faded as it has become, will never again award her that enchantment, that same, untainted delight.
She gets up to greet her father’s housekeeper in the kitchen and asks her to make tea before returning to the living room with the pot and placing it on the coffee table. Her father is facing the French doors that lead out to the balcony and she, with her back to the light, looks only at him. Although thin and somewhat shrunken with age, Faisal still, Hannah believes, retains the sense of presence he has always had, with his intelligent eyes and the calmness about him that is evident as soon as one comes near, into a welcoming orbit of tranquillity.
They are silent, enjoying the wet, rippling sounds of tea being poured and sipped, comforting noises that are filled with memories for both of them.
Hannah has always loved the stillness she can share with her father, periods of relief that she did not experience with her mother, who was mostly occupied with verbally identifying things that needed to be done and then doing them with equal vigour. Hannah attributes these gaps in conversation to an older generation of Lebanese, pauses that provide them the opportunity to realign themselves with what is at hand, to assess a situation before acting on it. As a girl she distinctly remembers sitting patiently in rooms filled with people when a sudden quiet would prevail and, to her surprise and discomfort, no one but herself would try to fill it. It is a lesson she identifies with patience and love because neither of these two qualities, she now realizes, can exist without the other.
—Hannah, hayati – her father looks searchingly at her – is everything all right?
She is puzzled by his question.
—You seem preoccupied about something, he adds.
—It’s the usual worry, I guess. Just concerned about the state of things. Sometimes I think we’re never going to know what security is in this country. I’m working on a series of articles for a British newspaper and the more I discover about what’s going on in this part of the world, the more despair I feel.
For a long time he does not say anything and she begins to think he might be dropping off in the silence.
—I was seventeen when the war began, Faisal finally says. All hell was breaking loose in Europe, but to us here it seemed a million miles away.
Hannah suddenly realizes that her father is referring to the Second World War.
—Even while millions were dying and the map of the world was being redrawn, he continues, we were lost in our own troubles, trying to fight for this country’s freedom from French control. I joined youth groups and went to meetings and took part in demonstrations calling for independence. Some of these activities were punishable by death at the time, you know. People were accused of sedition and hanged for a lot less by the Mandate authorities.
—The martyrs who fought for our independence, Hannah exclaims. We were taught about them at school.
Her father nods and continues.
—It was all such a long time ago that sometimes I have difficulty recalling exactly the feelings associated with it, the uncertainties and the anticipation. But what I cannot forget is the sense of urgency that surrounded those times, an urgency that made us think this period would never come to an end. We were wrong though.
—About the success of the fight?
—Maybe it’s just that we got older and too cynical to care, he says.
—Not cynical, she tells him. You were just caught up with the vagaries of everyday life.
During our exile to Cyprus while Lebanon’s civil war raged on, Father would come to visit every few weeks, staying just long enough to remind us of himself, so that sometimes it seemed he had been with us only in dreams, so fleeting was his presence, so light the grooves he left on my heart. Although I resented his absence at the time, I later understood that this impression of impermanence had less to do with the time that he spent with us than where he spent it. Father was only half himself when away from Lebanon, not because he had been diminished for want of home but because everything about him that was most true had Lebanon as its anchor.
Hannah wonders for a moment if this is also now true for her, if in leaving Lebanon, she might find it difficult to keep the pieces of herself together. Remaining whole would be impossible. She recalls that when she had first told Faisal of