When I first came to Beirut, I thought it was the center of the world. Where I grew up, in Halba, an hour away from Tripoli on the French roads, it was Tripoli that had always been the big city to us. Beirut seemed another world. The way I heard it spoken of at home, of expensive trips to Beirut that the neighbor’s neighbor took but which we could never afford, it might as well have belonged to another country.
Sitting in Religion and then Quran class after, with the tight hijab my mother tied around my head, it melted into my mind the same way Babylon, Jerusalem, Baghdad, Cordoba, Mecca and Medina did. Distant faraway cities, where people once found God, or found wisdom, or found love, around every corner.
But walking through Hamra, in soon-to-be-West Beirut for the first time when I was 26 years old–with my hair down, with my steps close in my long French pencil skirt, with the neon signs hanging from the Parisian-style buildings shining light off the rain over the Ottoman-paved cobblestone streets, with the young men and the young women, their hair shorter and skirts tighter than mine, their arms crossed within each other’s, walking into and out of bars together–I thought, surely, this must be the center of the world.
Damascus under the Umayyads. Baghdad under the Abbasids. Istanbul under the Ottomans.
Did all those great cities of the past also only realize they were the center of the world when it was clear a great war was at their steps? When their crowns had already fallen from their heads, though it hadn’t yet hit the ground?
This was the winter of 1974 into 1975. And the whole country knew where it was heading. They knew it even when they didn’t know it, even when they denied it because they didn’t want it to be true.
Everyone living in Beirut knew it, with one bomb after another set off one month after another. And the people in the countryside knew it, because no ever told them the old war ended. And though we believed we knew better, those of us closer to the cities also knew we didn’t know better at the same time. This world of uncertainty had made us no wiser than every peasant who could not tell you the name of the language they were speaking. It was cruel for us young people then, fresh from school, whether educated in Arabic or French or (more recently) English, to know that, for all our knowledge, we were none the wiser about all the things in life that actually mattered.
And once it started, in a way, we weren’t even really sure which war it was we wanted to end. Perhaps war had ended for others, for the people in countries strong enough to remove themselves from it. But it never really ended for us. It could not have ended, because we could really remember a time in which we had peace.
Perhaps it was the war that started in 1947 in Irsael-once-Palestine or Palestine-once-Israel. Perhaps it was the war that started in 1939 in Poland. Perhaps it was the war started in 1099, when the Christians first returned to Jerusalem and turned the sandy streets muddy with blood. Perhaps it was the war that started in 624 when Peace-Be-Upon-Him declared war on the Qureshis. Perhaps it was the war that was started before time was made or after the first time was lost, when the Israelites, led by Joshua, crossed the Jordan and encircled Jericho and slaughtered everyone within.
Perhaps it was the war that started yesterday, though we didn’t know it yet, with the last bomb set off in East Beirut.
But the lights and music down Hamra Street made you forget. It made you forget war. It made you forget heartbreak. It made you forget God, and it made you forget that it is when you forget Him that He is there, beside you, the closest.
After ordering a single drink–looking and then looking away at the men in the bar and the men in the street with their shirts open halfway down–I walked back home, stumbling on the cobblestone streets in my heels, back home to my small apartment the music label rented for me on Rue Alfred Nobel, between Rue Marie Curie and Rue Moustafa Kamel.
I chuckled every time I had to give directions home in a taxi. I imagined the three of them, Alfred Nobel, Marie Curie, and Ataturk, sitting there smoking on that street corner, unsure of what to say to each other.
The day after, I was going to meet Ziad, the composer. I had always sung, all through my younger years. And I couldn’t help but think of all those years as I walked into my apartment complex, past the lobby where I would ask the man behind the front desk to ring my parents’ number. I knew it would take a moment for my mother to get to the phone. It was the number to the village pharmacy, and it would take time for them to call up to my mother on the third floor above them, and it would take time for her to come down the stairs slowly, panting. So I went upstairs first to change into my house clothes before heading back down.
When I came back down, the man behind the counter said, “Now he-rings.” I thanked him and walked into the phone booth with the receiver and the handset, leaving the door only slightly ajar to make for the phone cable.
Listening to the phone ring and ring and ring, I thought back to the tight hijabs she wrapped around my head; I thought about the singing lessons she gave me as a child; I thought about the song contests she made me enter as a child; I thought about when I was 13 years old and I told her that I didn’t want to be to one to have to fulfill her dreams, that I never wanted to sing again.
And I thought about the day my father explained to me that women were not allowed to sing the call-to-prayer, and that it was correct that it was so; and I thought about the week my father came home with a new word: Osteosarcoma.
I thought about the week he died, as it settled on me that I was finally free; I thought about how we drove to Tripoli the morning of the first song contest I would sing as an adult, in the taxi with Ummi, as she screamed at the driver to go faster, as I rested my voice; I thought about the way I only looked to her for confirmation as I sung on stage, her there in the audience in her night-black niqab. All I could see of her was her face, like the moon, sobbing as she watched her only daughter singing Ya Aachikata el Wardi in front of an awed crowd.
When someone finally picked up the phone, I first heard the pharmacist, “Ya binti, stay-you on-the-line. Here-she mother-yours. Now she-comes.”
And soon I heard my mother’s voice, “Allô? Allôo?” We spoke quietly, for about five minutes. She asked me if I was nervous. I said no. “Akeed! Of course!” she said then defiantly, as if it would have been stupid of me if I had been nervous. “With-you the-loveliest voice in-the-world, ya binti, o daughter-my, and-this-composer in-the-self called-had-he-for-you. Hope-his, not will he-fail, and if failed-had-he, he the-fool.”
***
When I met Ziad the next day, he was who I expected him to be. I got to the studio early. He got there late, leaving me and the label’s executive waiting: waiting for 30 minutes for the phone call informing us why he was running late, and another 15 for him to be at the door.
When Ziad finally arrived, he was wearing sunglasses, and when he removed them, revealed two dark, hazel, barely-rested eyes. He had a thin face and thinning curly black hair and a full beard. It was clear he had been out all night. But no one bothered accusing him of it. Nor would he have been bothered to have been accused of it. He simply gave us a short apology and said that he had had a late night.
He was 31 then, and I was 26. He had spent the last five years making a name for himself, singing in Arabic and in French, with men and women, with Christians and Muslims and Druzes, in stern support of the Palestinians but then in mockery of their fanatics. Making a name for himself and making an enemy out of every political faction in the country while doing so.
But his songs drifted down Hamra Street every night, from the clubs, from the bars, from the car radios. And they enchanted you when they did.
And I was here with him now, having spent my last five years waiting for my father to die. And we were going to make an album together: love songs. But I already knew, and he already knew, and the label’s producer already knew, though didn’t know that he had already known, that it was soon going to become about something much more than love. As little as love could be torn away from history, politics, society, God.
He showed me to the studio room. He pointed to the live room where I would sing. A control room where he would listen and produce. And the label executive smiled at us and told us cheerfully to get to work.
And we did. We spent the entire day singing, with me in the live room, and him across that misty glass in the control room. He never had songs written down. “Writing-of-them,” he said to me that first day, “she-kills-them even before-what they-being-born-they.” So he would sing what he had in mind, and I would sing it after him. And he would sing his corrections, and I would sing it back to him until he was happy. And we moved through our first song like that, slowly, line by line, then couplet by couplet, then verse by verse.
That was the first day I had to remind him that it needs to be “Enta (‘you’ when said to a man),” if it’s going to be heard in my voice when singing to a lover, not “Anthee (‘you’ when said to a woman).” But he just waved off the suggestion. “You knowing what intended-had-I,” he said.
He couldn’t help it. When he was there, lost in the music, it came to him “Entee,” and he couldn’t bother, perhaps couldn’t risk, taking himself away from the music long enough to remember to say, “Enta.” That’s what convinced me that that song was about someone real. Some woman whose heart he must have broken but who broke his heart even worse in return. Enough, Enough, Oh love, Enough.
And we fell in love. Of course we did. That very day, though we hadn’t known it yet. He wasn’t the most attractive man, but if you watched him lose himself in the music, you would see how easy it was to fall in love with him, watching all his facades fall off one by one, seeing his heart slowly shine through, seeing him turn back into a child, overcome by emotion, sitting there alone beyond the glass, without comfort, without love.
Sitting with him on his side of the studio in the control room, at the end of the day, finally getting to hear all the best and worst takes we recorded that day, listening to him talk about what he thought the song still needed, I saw the wisdom in many of his suggestions but none in many others.
Then we sat quietly, letting the best takes we recorded that day play on repeat over the bare instrumentals he recorded in his apartment, each drinking a short glass of cognac that he had poured.
He closed his eyes when he felt it reach his head, and leaned back. It’s almost as if the rhythm came clearer to him then. I watched him, there with his eyes closed, as I wouldn’t have wanted to be seen watching him with his eyes open, and I thought of Hafez. All those poems about wine and music and love.
I walked home that night still tipsy from the cognac. The car radios that passed informed me another bomb had been set off in East Beirut. But all I heard was our music.
***
When I returned to work the next day, he was already there.
I marched into the studio. “I know where to take the song.”
“That, known-had-I from-before,” he said. “But let-us we-see if have-arrived-we to-same the-place.”
So, I walked into the live room, turned on the microphones, took a long breath, and began singing. I opened my eyes only sparingly to see his reaction across the glass. But every time I did, I saw him only nodding harder, only smiling wider. And I knew that, though kept separate the whole night, we had come to the same place, had perhaps even followed the same path.
We both knew, though neither of us knew we already knew, that that song was over. All that remained was us to find the perfect takes and the right mix. But its soul was here, between us, trapped somewhere in that glass, from where we weren’t going to let it escape.
***
And then, the river took us. And we let ourselves be taken. I remembered what my mother told me once, of how in Al-Andalus, in then-Muslim Spain, when people saw singers taken in by that river of song, they cried “Wa Ilah! Wa Ilah!”, believing they were possessed by the Holy Sprit, and did so for so many years so many times that they continue to call to God to this day, though they don’t realize it: “Olé! Olé!”
But I didn’t care then if I was possessed by God or by a djinn. I wasn’t going to let this river of song let go of me.
And neither was he. That back and forth, of songs, of ideas, of lyrics, of words, of voices, was all we wanted to do, day and night. Me with my hair up, sans maquillage, in the pajamas I had brought and kept in the studio to change into every morning. Him with his uncombed hair growing more from the sides of his head than it wanted to do anymore from its top, with his beard growing out in every direction, like rays from the sun in old paintings.
There were so many times I would push a voice into him, knowing it was imperfect, which he would swallow whole, and come back the next day with it perfected. I knew then that we were making my voice his and his voice mine.
We would end so many days with tired, tired voices. And so, we would speak low. And that was the voice of his in which I remembered him telling me everything about himself. Growing up in a suburb not far from the city, he had always seen it as his playground.
“But the-city humbled-had-she-me, returned-had-she-me to-size-my, when finally come-had-I lived-had-I here,” he said. “When tried-had-I make-I-her mine to-me. These-the-five years the-first spent-had-I all days-my in-the-studio and all nights-my in-the-clubs and the-bars and the-drinking, trying-and I-trying become-I to-Beirut like-what been-had-he Solomon to-Jerusalam.”
He was quiet for a long moment after, reminiscing over the wildness of memories that, with them, came so much pain.
“There-are cities,” I finally said. “where God he-lives for a time.”
“Like Baghdad days-of the-Abbasids,” he said.
“Like Damascus days-of the-Ummayuds,” I completed him.
“Like Jerusalem days-of Solomon.”
Could it really be Beirut now? I wondered that night. And I would wonder it every night I ever spent in Beirut.
***
Singing late into the night for weeks on end, as the loud city outside tried to drink and dance itself into forgetfulness–forgetfulness of war, of life, of heartbreak–I thought, so many times, this is better than sex, because if it wasn’t, it wouldn’t be all we were doing.
But the sex came. The day I learned to give into him. The day our voices, which had been growing towards each other then for a whole month, finally touched. The day I finally heard his voice when I heard his voice. The day I could understand its every plan and intention from a single note.
The day I finally learned to let his voice enter me, when I finally felt it possess me and leave its seed. The same day I saw him sing it “Enta (“you” when said to a man)” in a love song. That was the day I knew our souls had touched for the first time.
And after our last take was done, for the last song we wanted to record that day, I simply looked at him, across the glass, and he looked at me.
I took off my headphones and left the room and ran downstairs to the lobby and asked them to ring my mother’s number.
When I got back to the studio, I entered the control room without a word. He spun his chair to face me, and I walked over, and placed one knee over his left thigh on the other over his right, and lost the fingers of my right hand in his beard and the fingers of my left in his hair, and kissed him and then made love to him, right there on his control room chair, as he moved his feet under it to lock its wheels, one by one, in place.
***
And I barely saw my own apartment anymore. That night we had gone home to his place. We made love and fell asleep and woke up in the middle of the night, called back to life, by the same God or the same djinn, and sang to each other, sang new songs. Songs about love. But also songs about war. Songs about unity. Songs about togetherness. Songs about a dear Shia friend of mine because I was Sunni. Songs about a dear Sunni friend of his because he was Shia. Songs about all the Christians murdered by Sunnis and Shi’as, each of whom fought with each other so much that they forgot what it meant to be Muslim. And songs about heartbreak seeing your old, tender, country fall into war and war and war, over and over and over again.
It was clear to me then that music is how we both had always chosen to forget. Through every heartbreak, as children or as adults. I remember Edith Piaf singing that first night in his apartment, off the record player in the living room as we made love in the bedroom.
“This-is the street to-the-songs. We no-there meet not loves unhappy. We ourselves-love, we no-ourselves-love not. We ourselves-kiss, we ourselves-from go. We sing, and then voilà.”
The next night we drove up to my apartment, past Alfred and past Mustafa and past Marie sitting on the curb outside, and emptied my closets of all the clothes I bothered wearing anymore and threw one half in the closet in the studio and the rest in the closet in his bedroom.
Our lives were on fire, and our country was on fire, and our love was on fire, and the music came, like a river that we couldn’t let go of, because it couldn’t let go of us. And with the river still flowing inside us, we would work through the day and into night and sleep in each other’s arms, often in the studio, or finish a song to perfection as the sun was just about to set, then when every night was the eve of war, when every night was turning into Thursday night and Friday night, and get dressed as the tapes burned a song into a cassette, as I applied my makeup in the reflection of the glass before he rushed me downstairs to the car with my heels in his hands.
I drank his cognac in the car, and the world and everything in it would be spinning by the time we reached the front of the line and the bouncer saw us and recognized him and let us in as an entire city block that had been waiting hours to be let in jeered at us, drunk already and drinking more whenever they felt the alcohol loosen its hold.
He crossed his arms in mine as we entered the club, and we waded through the dance floor until we were at the DJ booth. Ziad’s face and his hand raised with a cassette tape within it was all the DJ needed to see before he snatched it from his fingers, before we heard the music we had recorded all morning roar through the speakers, before we saw a city of drunk mourners mourning for their country flood into the dancefloor and press into the crowd pressing against the DJ booth.
I remember thinking then, listening to my voice come down upon us as if from heaven, seeing the crowd lose itself in ecstasy upon the very first note, seeing their souls reach for where our souls lay, making love in the music, feeling my tears of ecstasy and my tears of fear and my tears of mourning all flood like rivers down my face.
I’m ready to die. Ya Heavenly Father-my up above. I am ready to die. Ya Rabb al-Alamin, Lord of the Worlds. Ya Ar-Rahman Ar-Rahim, the most gracious, the most forgiving. Take me if it is my time. Thank You for giving me at least this in my life. If this life won’t last much longer, let its last memory be this, this moment of pure ecstasy in the arms of a lover, in the arms of Your chosen city for a time.
Or is this death already? Had a suicide bomber already entered? Was he already priming the charges, as we all looked away, lost in music, lost in each other? Or had he already planted it this morning, under our feet? Was this moment the last moment of ecstasy we would spend here on Earth, in this Eden-for-an-instant, before He in Jannah upon high, with Yousef and Moussa and Issa and Peace-Be-Upon-Him at his side, was going to turn us back into the dust we came from? Or has it already gone off? Has he already trampled out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored? Has he already sounded forth the trumpet that shall never call retreat? Is he already sifting our hearts before his judgement seat?
Or will my life continue on afterwards? Will I live to see this country fight itself to nothingness, as its always fought itself to nothingness? Simply for who gets to own it, for who gets to call their God the only God over it.
Will I live to see Ziad fall out of love with me? I know he had made songs with so women before, sitting there in the control room with them singing in the live room. Am I only the last in a long line? Will he leave me like any other? Will I only be his for as long as this river flows and then forgotten the second it turns dry?
Or will he leave me only after I have given him one son and then a second? Will another woman my age now, half his age then, simply walk into that same recording studio and leave me with half a husband?
Will I forever just be thought of as the woman made famous by his songs? The one who all the producers in our label, and the one across the street, think they have the right to bed, just because I had bedded Ziad? The one they will then destroy for rejecting their advances? The one they will leave to rot to obscurity? The one they leave to be thought of forever as the one without the brain to sing for herself, the one who vanished into obscurity the moment her man left her and took his famed genius with him?
Or will he be faithful? And will I be faithful? And will we kill our music by choosing to stay with each other, in unhappy love that we remember this moment too fondly to let go?
Or will everything be fine? Will this country find its way out of its problems in peace? Will Ziad be my faithful husband and give me one daughter and a second? Will this river of song never stop? Will we spend our old age singing in the garden of the house we bought together in the mountains?
And then I heard my mother speak to me. Her voice I had forgotten I had called to ask her all of this, every single question, that night I walked downstairs from the studio room to call her, and ask her for advice, because I knew I loved Ziad and that Ziad loved me.
“No you-worry-you, ya binti,” I heard her say. “You lived-had-you life more from-me. What-what it-happens, ya habibti, o beloved-my, please I-beg-you, no you-forget-you: will be-you happy. With-you the music, ya binti. Whether become-had-you the-beloved-of Ziad, there in-the-house-yours in-the-country, surrounded by-the-grandchildren-yours, singing-you with-him until-last-of lifetime-your. Or-whether left-had-you-him, or left-had-he-you and-thus you-remain in-Beirut, and-you-become the singer songs-of the-love who been-had-she famous, you-inspiring the-girls who they-recognize-her in-the-street, even only by living lifetime-your by-self-her in-peace. What-what it-happens, ya habibti: will be-you happy.
“So no you-worry-you, ya binti, please. Let-you just river-of the-desire in-heart-yours she-takes-you. He, the one who placed-had-He-it there. And-no would-have-He no-if not been-had-she necessary you-hear-her.”
“Thank-you, ya immi, mother-my” was all I said.
“Surely, ya binti.”
And I hung up and waved thanks to the man at the front desk and walked back up to the studio. And when I walked back into the control room, he turned to see me.
He smiled and said “Hey, Enta!”
And when I was in his arms and he was in mine, with Beirut outside on fire, I simply said back to him, “Hey, Entee!”