An Unsafe Haven. Nada Jarrar Awar
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that hold the self together. When he and Hannah had occasion later to speak about it, it was with the realization that their respect for Maysoun, for her resilience in the face of so many challenges, could only grow with time.
She listens patiently to the details Peter gives her of Anas’s story and his concern about the whereabouts of his family before commenting on it.
—Yes, we have the means to trace them, she says. Why don’t you tell him to come here to put in an official request whenever he’s ready?
—Thanks for that, Maysoun. I’ll tell Anas to get in touch with you. But I don’t want to keep you here any longer. Shall we walk together?
—Yes, Maysoun says. That would be nice.
In just the past year, Beirut has changed in many ways that are sometimes difficult for him to pinpoint but which once they occur seem immediately familiar. The many beggars in the street who grow increasingly insistent, even at times aggressive; the obvious weariness in people’s eyes as they go past; half-empty restaurants; a pall, a greyness that depresses him; a disconnection that instead of feeling like release, brings on disquiet.
He remembers his childhood in Detroit so clearly, he thinks now, because it is a past that contrasts dramatically with his present. He recalls an almost antiseptic quality to those days, an absence of discord and tension that his parents, white, middle-class and liberal, only served to confirm.
Growing older, he had found himself being drawn to the children of immigrants, people whose lives seemed coloured by a chaos and passion unfamiliar to him. Many of his friends were Arab; one in particular became a constant companion, a Lebanese boy whose older sisters were blessed with an exotic beauty that drew Peter even then: the same dark, deep eyes of his future wife, the same impenetrable reserve, hair and skin contrasting like shadow and light, and an almost imperceptible trembling beneath the surface that suggested heightened awareness.
It was not long before mixing, eating and living with families whose lives were prescribed by the customs they had brought with them from far-off places made Peter feel he was acquiring a new identity, one that fell somewhere between bland and overspilling, but which nonetheless did not fit in places. But he only grew more confused about his identity with time; he left school believing he would find it, not in the direction in which his past was bound to lead him, but in the unforeseen future, where experience would lend him the clarity and skill to realize his true self.
At medical school, his days ruled by exams, exhaustion and unrelenting illness, he had finally found the direction he needed, had worked hard to fill the gaps created by a wandering mind, discovered purpose where he had once known only ambiguity.
Perhaps it was inevitable that when he met Hannah while on a visit to Beirut with his Lebanese friend one summer, Peter had been immediately drawn to the unfamiliar in her; sensed also, as they spent more time together, the same inquisitiveness that had propelled him when he was younger, though in Hannah curiosity was hardly a quiet pursuit. Before long, he had recognized an attachment to her that he knew would not fade once he returned to America to complete his studies. There was much at stake for him by then: a job at a prestigious teaching hospital on the East Coast where he would specialize in paediatrics; yet beyond that there was the pull of a woman and her beloved city that would dictate the trajectory of life to come.
When he returned to Beirut two years later, Hannah was waiting as he had known she would be, and since civil marriage is not legal in Lebanon – Hannah and Peter were born into different faiths – they decided to fly to Cyprus and marry there. With time, Peter discovered that while his love for his wife grew steadily, he was less able to articulate it, as though its increasing depth made it more mysterious and inaccessible to him, as though it had expanded to embrace much more than either of them could put into words.
More and more, though, as conflict spreads throughout the region and Lebanon trembles in the midst of it, he senses resistance in himself to the uncertainty of it all, finds it increasingly difficult to separate place from people, to disconnect his love for Hannah from the country to which she belongs.
—Perhaps it’s me, he finds himself saying out loud.
—Peter?
—I’m just thinking, is it that I’m feeling despair or is it just that I seem to be surrounded by it these days?
Maysoun smiles.
—Probably something of both, she says.
They walk up Sadat Street and turn right in the direction of the sea and towards Maysoun’s building.
During Peter’s first visit to Beirut, he had enjoyed the quirkiness of the city’s byways, the narrow limits of neighbourhoods that, in the minds of locals, were marked and distinctive. Asking for directions elicited conversation rather than providing the information he sought. Often, he would be told to keep walking straight ahead and ask someone at the next corner, or if he were after something in particular to buy, he would be directed to a completely different shop where, he was assured, he could find a better product.
Once, stopping to ask an old man sitting at the entrance to a building where the nearest pharmacy was located, he was surprised by the response.
—Why do you need the pharmacy? the old man asked.
At first, Peter was too astonished to reply.
—I … I have a cough and I need to get some medication for it, he said in halting Arabic.
The old man looked up at him with rheumy eyes and made a disapproving sound with his tongue.
—Tsk, tsk, tsk. You young people don’t know how to take care of yourselves, do you? Not wearing the right clothes in the cold, going in and out of air-conditioned rooms with hardly anything on. What do you expect? Of course you’re going to get sick.
After which, and to Peter’s great amusement, the old man grudgingly directed him to a nearby pharmacy as well as advised him what medication he should ask for.
Eventually, Peter became aware of an invisible connectedness between people and places here, a kind of map of everyday relationships, of being, that was easy to follow once you knew how and made for a sense of rootedness which he had not encountered anywhere else.
It seems to him that while in Western societies the inner lives of people tend to shape their existence, the oppo-site is true in this part of the world where the external is what dominates lives. Perhaps it is a function of the fact that in the West, there is much about one’s environment that one can take for granted and, therefore, safely ignore. Peter believes that this is the case only in part, that reality is more complicated, that there is a willingness to concede to fortune in this society that helps people cope: not fatalism exactly but a genuine recognition that acceptance is sometimes the best option in circumstances over which one has no control.
—Sometimes, he says out loud, I think I will never be able to shake off the influences of my background.
Maysoun turns to him and, as she does so, he looks on in fascination as the fading sunlight touches her face, her transparent skin, her eyes, sharp and knowing.
—But why would you want to? she asks. Why would you ever want to let go of the one thing that defines you, Peter?
Hannah’s father lives in the apartment where she and her brother had been brought up, near the sea – though the apartment does not look directly on to it – a neighbourhood which her father says was once the wilderness of Ras Beirut, where jacaranda and lemon trees grew in profusion and, at dusk, the sun swept over vast fields of tall grasses, over the water, in ever-widening arcs of amber reds.
—This, Faisal always tells her in his shaky old voice, was long before you were born, Hannah, when I was a young boy and my brothers and I would come here to play after school despite your grandmother having forbidden it.
She