Читать книгу A Good Land - Nada Jarrar Awar - Страница 7

Beirut is the city of dreams, at once magnificent and fragile, filled with instances of grace, ephemeral pockets of loveliness that can overwhelm even courageous hearts. There is colour here and brilliance, the hum of movement and its attending sounds; there are buried sorrows and there is transcending joy; and everywhere, flowing through the intricate, complex layers that are people and places, breathes unrestrained life.

Yet the city no longer possesses an obvious beauty. Very little of the lush greenness I knew when I was growing up and which once defined our many neighbourhoods remains. Beirut is invariably overcrowded with people and construction that is haphazard and garish, and areas that once hummed with life lack character and a real sense of community. What is it then that makes us love it so?

I live between the east and west of the city in a yellowed building tucked away at the end of an alleyway that begins on a bustling main road. The building has no elevator. Instead, the tenants have to struggle up a long stairway that wraps itself round the exterior walls of some of the floors and plunges into the building’s interior on others.

My second-floor apartment shares a wall with the outside stairwell which is often noisy, in the early mornings when other tenants are rushing off to work or school and late at night when some of them venture home again. And although it is part of a more recent addition to the building, the flat has uneven floors in places so that, walking through it, I can feel myself leaning towards uncertainty, teetering on the brink.

There is enough room in the kitchen for a table where I have most of my meals, sitting on one of the two chairs. Afterwards, standing at the sink, I look through the window out onto the alley as I do the washing up, a plate and utensils, a glass and a pot or pan, daydreaming into the future. And at night, lying in the windowless, small bedroom at the back of the apartment, I fall asleep sheltered by layers of comfort, my bed and the sheets and blankets that touch my skin, and the walls around me that enclose a deep, undisturbed darkness.

The neighbourhood is heavily populated, older buildings crowded in by newer and higher construction and pavements that are either narrow or totally non-existent. Small shops that sell all kinds of wares line the streets and the constant flow of traffic on the main road adds to the noise level and the impression of overcrowding. Stepping out into the street every morning, I am quickly enveloped by the energy that surrounds me and filled with hope, with the sense that wherever I turn, something is certain to happen.

I walk past a shop that sells tyres and spare parts for cars, a butcher’s, and a dry-cleaner’s that also doubles up as a telephone and fax centre. I turn onto the main road where cars jostle their way up the one-way street, almost nudging each other as they move in fits and spurts, their horns blaring. On one corner, inches away from oncoming traffic, a man sells fruits and vegetables from a large wooden cart, and beyond that there is a flower shop with fresh as well as artificial flowers in plastic vases placed outside its front window.

At a tiny corner café minutes from home, I order my usual cup of coffee and stand at a counter overlooking the street, sipping it slowly. Most days, I am the only woman there and the men on either side of me move away as soon as I arrive, their gazes averted. It is their way of giving me room and making me more comfortable, I know, but it is a kindness I cannot acknowledge since it might be considered too forward of me to thank them outright. Instead, I remain silent and look out onto the street, gathering my thoughts about me and observing the many passers-by.

In returning to Lebanon after long years away, I envisioned exactly this life for myself: moments quietly accumulating with me in the midst of a sea of people and activity, separate in some ways but linked nonetheless to the steady, relentless movement that fills the day.

I am on the stairwell when I hear the thud, feel it move from my belly down into my feet, the tips of my toes tingling with fear. I have heard this sound before and it is not, I know, the echo of a slamming door somewhere in the building, nor the din of heavy machinery from the construction site down the road.

Within seconds, neighbours come out onto the outside landing to investigate.

‘What was that?’ someone asks.

‘I’m not sure,’ I reply, my heart beating fast.

‘Sounded like a car bomb to me,’ another neighbour says. ‘God knows we heard enough of them during the war to know.’

‘Look, there’s smoke rising over there!’

We turn in the direction of the sea to see a black cloud forming.

‘It’s coming from the Corniche,’ I murmur with dismay.

A neighbour from the flat next door puts her hand on my arm.

‘Were you on your way to work, Layla?’ she asks.

I nod.

‘Maybe it’s best you don’t go out today. Until we find out what’s going on, that is.’

She is still in dressing gown and slippers and looks pale without her usual make-up.

‘Reminds me of the American embassy bombing in 1982,’ she continues, shaking her head. ‘That’s exactly where the smoke came from then.’

‘It’s Hariri,’ someone shouts up the stairwell moments later. ‘I just heard it on the news.’

We look at each other. ‘Hariri?’

Hariri is the billionaire businessman who served as prime minister for two terms after the end of the civil war. A larger than life character, he is credited with being the driving force behind Beirut’s reconstruction efforts and, most recently, has been pushing hard for changes in the country’s electoral laws.

‘Why would they want to kill him?’

‘Layla!’

I look up to see Margo gesturing from above, her mass of white hair more unruly than usual.

‘Come up, sweetheart.’

I run up the stairs and wrap my arms around my old friend. I seem unable to stop myself from shaking.

‘Something terrible has happened, Margo, I’m sure of it,’ I say, hearing the shrill of ambulance sirens in the distance.

We step inside and Margo turns on the radio in the kitchen.

‘Try one of the local stations,’ she tells me with her grainy voice. ‘You can translate the Arabic for me.’

It takes me a few moments to adjust the dial on the radio. I sit down to listen. The announcer’s voice falters as he speaks. I eventually turn to Margo.

‘Oh, my god. It is Hariri. They’re saying a huge car bomb has targeted his motorcade. They think he’s among those who have been killed.’

Margo frowns.

‘It sounded like a massive explosion. And at this time of day there would have been lots of people about on the Corniche.’

She pulls open a kitchen drawer, takes out a packet of cigarettes and a lighter and sits down on one of the stools by the sink.

‘I suppose any one of his political rivals might have done it,’ I say, shaking my head. ‘Or even an outside power. They’ve all been known to try to settle their differences with violence.’

‘Poor man,’ Margo says.

‘How could anyone do such a terrible thing?’

She reaches up and attempts to smooth back her hair.

‘I don’t know, sweetheart. But it’s hardly the first time something like this has happened in this country, is it?’

‘But we thought all that was long over, Margo. We’ve had peace for a while now. Surely it should have lasted longer than this?’

‘It’s no use trying to understand,’ she says, removing a cigarette from the packet. ‘Violence isn’t supposed to make sense.’

You should know, Margo, I begin to say but stop myself in time.

‘I dread to think what might happen next,’ I murmur instead.

Margo lights up.

‘No one can know that, Layla.’

It is not the reassuring answer I had been looking for.

‘You’re right, Margo,’ I say, feeling a little foolish.

‘It’s alright, sweetheart,’ she says gently. ‘It’s normal to want to be reassured at a time like this.’

By the end of the day, the death of Hariri is confirmed, along with the deaths of fifteen others, some from his entourage as well as some innocent bystanders. I watch the terrible images on the television. The huge crater in the road, the damage to surrounding buildings, and what look like charred human remains amongst the shattered glass and rubble. There is a great deal of speculation on the news about who might have carried out the assassination and grim predictions about the likely consequences.

For the first time since my return to Lebanon, I ask myself if I did the right thing in coming back. I could have continued to enjoy a quiet life in Australia where my parents and I had fled years earlier because of the civil war here. Mixed in with the anxiety and fear, I’m also feeling angry about what has just happened. How dare they do this after all that this country has already been through?

I sit on the sofa in my small living room with a blanket wrapped around me and eventually fall into an uneasy sleep.

I grew up in a neighbourhood not far from the waterfront where spring rains sometimes flooded the streets and, in summer, whiffs of sea air provided relief from the dank, persistent heat. My father and his brothers owned a petrol station on the Corniche of Ras Beirut, and my mother, a beautiful woman with a calm demeanour, taught at the school that I attended.

I remember childhood as a breezy existence that was only interrupted when civil war broke out, the grown-ups around me taking on a sudden heaviness in their manner, an anxious air, their brows often furrowed. Throughout the turmoil that ensued, my parents continued to love me quietly, not without intensity, but modestly and with deliberation, a love that did not demand reciprocation but rather offered me a good measure of freedom. Encouraging my progress in whatever I attempted to do, they did not push me to prove myself, and whenever I went to them for answers that no one else seemed able to provide, they would consider my question seriously before giving a reply, building in me a sense of self-worth that would stand me in good stead in later life.

Of those childhood years, I also remember the fragile feel of my body, long, thin limbs and my heart beating through my chest. I would run with a host of other children in the neighbourhood through the streets and across the busy thoroughfare. Then, sensing the growing strength that was mine, climbing over the blue railing at the edge of the promenade and onto the boulders on the other side, I would breathe in the sea air and watch the fishing boats bob up and down in the water.

After enduring several years of Lebanon’s sectarian and bloody civil war, my parents packed up all our belongings and moved to Australia to start anew. Arriving in Adelaide, we were warmly welcomed by relatives who helped my mother and father find work and eventually a home of our own. I was an adolescent then, awkward and unforgiving and unwilling to join in the grown-ups’ apparent enthusiasm for this new adventure. Still, as soon as life began to take on a predictable pattern, I was sent to the local school and eventually settled into the reality of being so far from the only home I had ever known.

We lived in a bungalow in the suburbs that had lemon and orange trees in its small garden and a front lawn that I liked to walk on barefoot, the newly mown grass rubbing against the soles of my feet and making them tingle. On Saturday mornings, my mother would take me into the city for hot chocolate and dessert at one of the cafés in the central shopping district. We would talk and browse through the shops and return home to find my father in the living room watching television or, when it was warm, in a straw hat and sunglasses relaxing on a deck chair in the garden.

Now my parents seemed like different people, took on separate selves that had not been apparent before they left Beirut. There were moments also when my own life seemed illusory and undeserved, until I felt I might one day have to rouse myself from it and face reality, though I did not know when or how that would happen.

I made friends, children like myself from a rapidly growing Lebanese diaspora, as well as young Australians to whom I felt attracted because they were boisterous and happy and unburdened by complicated pasts.

With time, I began to see those intervening years between leaving Lebanon and longing to return to it as a reprieve, an opportunity to garner the strength I would eventually need once I went back. I got through high school as if in a dream and once at university felt as though I was discovering another dimension to myself, one that was adept at maintaining this dual existence with composure. Then, after gaining my doctorate, I worked for a few years, making plans to go back home despite my parents’ inevitable objections. I cannot, I told them once it came time to leave, fully embrace this life when the one we left behind us still clings to me even as I attempt to escape it.

I came back to take a job as a lecturer in English literature at the American University, feeling safe in the knowledge that I once again belonged somewhere that mattered. Yet now that I have been here for some time, living the uncertainties that we all have to face, I am sometimes less sure of my intentions than I had been as a young girl, as though my initial resolve had dissipated over time, leaving me with a yearning that I can no longer clearly understand.

There are times when, unable to sleep, I put on my slippers, wrap a shawl around myself and tiptoe up the stairs to the upper landing where the lights of the city flicker through the dark. I lean over the concrete banister and sniff at the air and imagine I hear the sounds of Beirut calling to me, soft whispers that rise from the sea and then gently float up into the waiting sky, memories of a past I cannot leave behind.

The morning after the assassination, I sense a stir in the building and go out onto the landing to find out what is happening.

‘They’re taking the remains for burial in downtown Beirut,’ a neighbour tells me as he’s going down the stairs.

‘Where from?’ I ask him.

‘From his villa up the road,’ he shouts up the stairwell.

I go back into the apartment, grab my handbag and rush outside again. Once on the street, I am surprised by the number of people who are walking singly or in groups in the direction of Hariri’s home. Despite the crowds, everything seems eerily quiet. I eventually find myself being pushed along by the swarm behind a coffin hoisted onto the shoulders of a group of young men and draped with a large Lebanese flag. I recognize two of the bearers as Hariri’s sons. An ambulance inches its way ahead of us and I wonder when the men will tire and have to relinquish their burden to it.

As we move slowly forward into the neighbourhoods that lead into Beirut’s downtown, people continue to join us. Soon, I can no longer see the coffin. I look up at the buildings on either side of the road. The balconies are crowded with onlookers, some of whom are waving at the throng. Again, I am struck by the despondent mood that surrounds me. Passions usually run high at funerals in this country but everyone here seems subdued with grief. The silence only serves to heighten the ominous nature of the occasion.

I lose my footing and stumble before managing to pick myself up again. For a moment, as I look down to regain my balance, I notice some of the shoes worn by those walking next to me. Elegant feet in precariously high-heeled boots next to a pair of well-worn, fake leather lace-ups in an ugly shade of mustard; white trainers with their instantly recognizable logo alongside two very grubby feet in plastic slippers that make a slapping noise as they move. I lift my head and blink with astonishment. Although popular among much of Lebanon’s upper classes, Hariri has never struck me as a man of the people. Yet here we apparently are, rich, poor and everything in between, marching at his funeral.

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.

She regrets being too headstrong in her youth, failing to see her father’s point of view while he was still alive, and being too crotchety in her old age; and once, standing outside the mesh fencing that surrounded a group of German prisoners of war, a young soldier, unkempt and with fear in his eyes, approaching her, asking for a cigarette: she took one out of its packet, lit it and then, the soldier watching, threw it on the ground and stepped on it for good measure.

What could have possessed me to do something so cruel? Margo muttered quietly to herself. Since the only god she believes in is the power of one’s own conscience, I know this is one transgression among many that she can never forgive herself for. I know also, because of my love for her, that she is so much more than her past or her present, more than her misdeeds and regrets; that within the immeasurable spaces of Margo’s heart lies the freedom to be without judgement, beyond fear. And at a time when my own anxiety over the situation here seems to be growing beyond my control, her strength is formidable to me.

This is what I also see in my dreams: Margo holding her front door open, the sun from the living room window lighting the air behind her so that she appears to glow through the outlines of her body. She is looking out with wonder, with the certainty of infinite compassion, and on the other side, trembling a little, is me.

When I first knew Margo, she volunteered at a centre for disabled children not far from where we live. She was stronger then than she is now and looked forward to the two afternoons a week she spent supervising a play group. She spoke to me often of the children, explaining that many of their disabilities were due to the poverty they lived in, lack of immunization, perhaps, or unsupervised home births. Yet despite the challenges they faced, Margo always insisted, the children made every effort to enjoy their afternoons in the playground.

‘They love the new climbing frame that we had put in recently,’ she tells me one day. ‘Now we’re trying to collect enough money for a sandbox. That should be great fun for them.’

‘Children like that sort of thing, don’t they?’

Margo’s eyes narrow.

‘You haven’t had much exposure to children, have you, sweetheart?’

‘I just don’t think I’d be any good with them, that’s all.’

‘Well, you won’t know unless you try,’ says Margo. ‘Why don’t you come with me next Saturday? We could do with some more help.’

The playground is small but very colourful, with several swings, a large slide and the climbing frame that Margo has told me about. We walk into a small structure at one end of the playground and Margo introduces me to some of the other volunteers she works with.

‘The children will be arriving soon,’ she says, turning to me. ‘Let’s go meet them.’

There are over a dozen girls and boys between the ages of four and ten, some in wheelchairs being pushed by their adult helpers, others on crutches or with walking frames, and still others approaching on their own, walking carefully and as if on the tips of their toes. I watch in silence as Margo greets each of the children, asking them how they are and encouraging them to have a good time.

I nervously walk up to a young boy as he tries to climb up to the top of the slide. He has a metal brace on one of his legs.

‘Would you like me to help you?’ I ask quietly.

He looks at me and nods.

I try to push him up the steps from behind and when that doesn’t work put my hands under his arms and half-lift him to the top. Once there, the little boy sits down, places his good leg on the slide and then picks up the other with both hands and swings it over while I hold on him. Then he stretches both arms out like wings and plunges down the slide, landing with a loud thump on his bottom. I run to him, thinking that I will find him in tears and will have to comfort him. Instead, he is smiling widely.

‘Can we do that again?’ he asks me.

‘Yes,’ I say, suddenly feeling sad. ‘Of course we can.’

I spend half an hour or so wandering around the playground with the other volunteers, watching the children and sometimes approaching to help them. I am not quite sure how to play with them as the other adults are doing and soon begin to feel inadequate. When Margo calls me to go back inside with her I sense that she has noticed my predicament.

‘They’ll be coming in for a snack soon,’ she says. ‘I’ll need you to help me with that, sweetheart.’

We roll labneh sandwiches and place them on individual paper plates, then we pour orange juice into plastic cups and set them all on a large table in the middle of the room.

‘There are some packets of biscuits on the top of the fridge, Layla. Could you bring them down for me? We’ll have to open them up and place them on those platters over there.’

I give Margo the biscuits and begin to collect plastic chairs from around the room and place them around the table.

‘Don’t do that yet, sweetheart,’ Margo stops me. ‘Some of the children will be sitting at the table with their wheelchairs so it’s best to wait until they come in to sort it out.’

I am unable to move.

‘Layla? Are you alright?’

I shake my head and sit down.

‘You’re crying.’ Margo lays a hand on my shoulder. ‘What’s the matter, sweetheart?’

‘It’s heartbreaking, Margo,’ I sniff. ‘They’re so small and it’s so difficult for them. How do they cope?’

Margo reaches into her sleeve for a tissue and hands it to me.

‘Come on,’ she says gently. ‘Let’s go back outside. I need a cigarette.’

We sit on a bench in a corner of the garden. I wait for Margo to say something but she is too busy lighting her cigarette. I take a deep breath and look out at the children. The sun has gone behind a cloud and the playground is now in half-shadow. It suddenly seems as though the children are moving in slow motion, swinging forwards and backwards on the swings, moving up and down through the climbing frame or just sitting in their wheelchairs, waving their arms above their heads. When, moments later, the sun comes out again and casts its rays over us, I realize that rather than awkwardness, it is grace that I have just witnessed.

‘I lived in London near a park that had a pond and a wooden bridge that floated above it in a gentle arch,’ Margo interrupts my reverie. ‘I used to go there now and then with a bagful of stale bread and throw it down to the ducks and geese that swam beneath the bridge. It was beautiful there, so green and quiet.’

She looks at me and grins.

‘And although it’s very different here,’ Margo continues, ‘it’s beautiful too, don’t you think?’

I laugh.

‘How is it Margo that you always manage to read my mind?’

‘Look at them, Layla. They’re totally absorbed in their playing and are oblivious to anything but the moment they’re living right now.’

‘Yes,’ I sigh. ‘They can’t help but be beautiful, can they?’

She draws on her cigarette and blows a thin cloud of smoke in my direction.

If I had ideas when I first knew Margo that there was anything romantic or exciting about the war she fought in, she soon changed my mind.

‘There was urgency, yes, and immediacy, but not pleasure,’ she tells me as we sit on the landing in front of her apartment one evening.

‘But you met the love of your life in the Resistance,’ I protest. ‘You and John were so brave.’

‘The war only made it more difficult for us, Layla, not easier.’

‘Surely, you only started to feel that way much later on, Margo. I can tell from the stories you’ve told me that you knew at the time what you were doing was important.’

‘Stories, yes,’ Margo sighs. ‘But it wasn’t long before we stopped thinking of ourselves as heroes, although I didn’t understand why until later.’

I wait for her to continue.

‘I remember once being in Paris while expecting John back from a mission. It was early summer and many people had left the city because of the occupation. The streets, homes and shops seemed completely deserted to me and it was sad too. The truth was, of course, that there were still many Parisians there just getting on with their lives and trying to avoid attention.

‘I walked into a café for something to eat and there was a middle-aged woman serving. I noticed after a while that she was the only one working there, so I asked her why that was. She just put a plate of food in front of me and walked away without replying.

‘I didn’t stop there, of course. I finished my meal and went up to the counter where she was rinsing out some glasses and asked her why she was running the place on her own.’

Margo clears her throat and looks out into the distance.

‘The woman was clearly very irritated with me but she finally gave me an answer. She said that her husband had been taken away by the Germans and that although her son and his young family had fled, she had refused to go with them.

‘But why would you want to stay, I asked her. “I’m waiting it out,” she said. I didn’t understand what she meant. “I’m waiting it out,” she told me again, “because I know it won’t last, war never does, and someone has to be here to put the pieces back together again when it’s all over.”’

Margo wraps her arms around herself.

‘I felt so small. There I was feeling important when I suddenly realized that our fight would be won by people just like her who stubbornly held on to their daily existence and resisted just by insisting on living their lives as they always had.’

I lean over to take her hand and we continue to gaze up together at the darkened sky.

‘I love you, Margo,’ I say.

I walk through the open front door of Margo’s apartment and find a man in the sitting room. He is grey-haired and pleasant-looking and stands up as soon as I arrive.

‘Oh, hello,’ I say, reaching out to shake his hand. ‘I’m Layla. A friend of Margo’s.’

‘How do you do?’ he says, with a smile. ‘And I’m Fouad.’

‘Layla, sweetheart,’ Margo says, coming in from the kitchen. ‘How nice of you to drop in.’

I turn to her and smile.

‘I won’t keep you, Margo,’ I say. ‘I just thought I’d come by to say hello.’

‘Oh, sweetheart, please sit down. I’ve been wanting you to meet Fouad for a while now. He’s a dear friend from years and years ago.’

Margo has mentioned Fouad to me before. I nod and smile.

‘Why don’t I go make some more coffee?’ Margo says as I sit down. ‘I’ll be right back.’

Fouad and I look closely at one another. I am very curious about anyone from Margo’s past.

‘So how long have you known Margo?’ I ask, a little surprised at my own boldness.

‘Hm. Would you believe over fifty years?’

He chuckles at my astonishment and his eyes disappear into his face with his smile.

‘We met when I was a student in London right after the war,’ he continues. ‘It doesn’t actually feel like that long ago, but I suppose it is. What about you? How do you know Margo?’

‘Oh, we’re neighbours. I live on the floor below. I met her when I moved in here a few years ago.’

I want to ask him what Margo was like when she was young but I am afraid of appearing too forward.

‘You want to know more about Margo and her past, don’t you?’

I’m startled by his question.

‘Am I that transparent?’

‘I don’t blame you,’ he says, leaning forward in his seat. ‘I would be curious too. She’s a remarkable woman and she’s been through a great deal.’

‘She’s a very special friend,’ I say.

‘What is he telling you?’ Margo appears in the doorway with a tray.

I help her carry it to the table and pour the coffee.

‘Just how wonderful you are, my dear,’ Fouad says. ‘But Layla already knows that, I think.’

Margo sits down, lights a cigarette and looks at me through a cloud of smoke, her eyes half-closed, her head tilted to one side.

‘Fouad helped me through a very difficult period in my life,’ she says. ‘I owe him a great deal.’

We talk mostly about Beirut and the unfolding of our lives here. With Margo looking on, I tell him about my work at the university and am then delighted to hear that he graduated from there, too many years ago to admit to, he laughs. Like me, Fouad is Beirut born and bred, though since the death of his wife two years ago he has been living in their house in the hills above the city because it is easier to be alone there, he explains, with a garden for solace and a mountain of memories to sort through.

‘You must come up with Margo next time she visits, Layla,’ Fouad says. ‘Get away from the strain and stress of living in Beirut. We don’t hear about the antics of our politicians up there. It’s like being in a different country.’

‘I would love to, thank you,’ I reply and look at Margo for a reaction.

‘Yes, of course you must,’ she says with a smile. ‘It would do you lots of good.’

At home later, I replay the visit in my mind. Margo has always been guarded about her friends, especially those like Fouad from the distant past, and although I am certain he knows much more about her than I do, I don’t think she would want him to talk to me about it. It is not the first time I experience bewilderment in her presence. It is as if there are aspects to her life that I will never understand, the darker side of an otherwise resplendent moon.

I think of love as a state of being that I might one day find myself in without previous intention. This is how I feel about Beirut, after all, an attachment that I am not conscious of ever acquiring, my love for it having no beginning nor a likely end, a bond that is impossible to abandon because it has become so much a part of me.

Soon after my return to Beirut, a colleague in my department who had been born in America to Lebanese parents asks me to come out to see a film with him. The film, based on a novel about immigrants in a Western city, is very moving, and afterwards, over a light dinner at a quiet restaurant not far from the theatre, we discuss it at length, examine the motivation behind the characters’ actions and the strengths and weaknesses of the plot.

‘I imagine the reverse is also true, that it has been difficult for you to adjust to being here again, after all the years away,’ David says as we eventually make our way home.

‘This country has changed so much since I was a child,’ I sigh.

‘And you are very different as well, aren’t you?’

I laugh nervously and stop to look up at him for a moment.

‘Yes, that too, I suppose.’

With time, I discover in David an underlying kindness that puts me at my ease. It is not just being with him that makes me contented but also the anticipation of our encounters, the certainty that they will continue to be a part of today and of the days to come. We speak of work and of our pasts, the small town in Virginia where David’s parents had settled and his childhood there, my experience of the civil war and the years that followed my family’s departure. We also indulge our mutual love of literature by discussing favourite authors and books, the successes or otherwise of our endeavours as teachers and our ambitions for the future. David taught in the United States for many years and could have expected to get far in the academic world there, yet still chose to come to Beirut.

‘Why come here now, David, when things are in such a mess?’ I ask him as we sit in my office one day.

‘Life in the West is not always what it might seem,’ he replies. ‘I just wanted to get away, to experience something new and different.’

He is in the armchair by the open window and for a moment a passing breeze ruffles his fair, smooth hair.

‘And is it different enough for you?’

David shifts in his seat and looks at me.

‘So you were only looking for something exotic and you plan to leave eventually, is that it?’ I continue, surprised at the sharpness in my voice. ‘Once you’ve had enough of new and different, I mean.’

‘Have I said something to upset you?’

I suddenly feel ashamed of myself.

‘I’m sorry.’

‘Layla, are you alright?’

He stands up and walks towards me.

‘I’m fine,’ I reply. ‘Just fine. Why don’t we go get something to eat?’

Soon after this conversation, David left Lebanon to return to America, just as I had suspected he would. I am here to stay, I say out loud alone in my bed at night, and nothing will happen to change that.

On days when Margo seems particularly frail, her small body shaking more than usual, her speech more deliberate, she is more inclined to talk about herself if I ask her a question about her life and wait for her to begin at some undefined point in her past, to unravel stories like tangled twine.

We go for a walk through the university campus and sit on a wooden bench surrounded by the trees and plants Margo so loves.

‘My mother adored flowers and our house was always full of them,’ she begins. ‘It’s no wonder really that I grew up dreaming of being a gardener, although father was horrified at the thought.’

When she turned sixteen and her parents discovered that Margo had fallen in love with the gardener, they hurriedly shipped her off to finishing school in Switzerland. And although the young man was soon forgotten, she never quite lost her love for growing things. Now, in place of a garden of her own, Margo tends the plants in the pots at her doorstep.

‘What happened after they sent you away?’ I ask.

‘My parents were hopeful I would change and there was a part of me that wanted to please them but I still managed to disgrace myself at finishing school doing things that were bound to infuriate everyone, like smoking and drinking and getting up to all sorts of mischief with the boys.’

She sighs, takes a cigarette and lighter out of her pocket and lights up.

‘I was eventually sent back home, of course. I think that’s when I realized that I was never going to get my parents’ approval so I might as well stop trying. Still, when the war began and the time finally came for me to go, it was difficult to leave them.’

There is a sudden kind of croak in her voice now, age and years and years of smoking, I suppose, that makes me jump every time I hear it. I don’t know if she uses it for dramatic effect or if she really does not know how startling it can be.

‘Ah!’ Margo opens her mouth wide.

Then she shakes her head and smiles.

‘I told them I wanted to go to London to study English and they agreed even though I don’t think they believed that was what I really intended to do. I suppose they didn’t object because they didn’t know what else to do with me. I packed my bags and made my farewells and when I looked back to wave goodbye, they seemed already to be fading from sight. Mama, papa and Emily standing on the balcony of our flat in Prague, looking silently down at me as I got into the taxi that took me to the train station.’

‘Don’t you mean Paris?’ I ask, puzzled.

But Margo does not reply.

‘I never saw my parents again,’ she says after a long pause.

I clear my throat.

‘What happened?’

‘The war went on and on until some of us thought it would never end and when I returned they were no longer there.’

I remember in Adelaide once talking to the grandfather of a friend of mine who kept referring to ‘the war’ during our conversation. It was a while before I realized that he was not talking about the civil conflict in Lebanon that had so affected my own life but about the Second World War which, for his generation, had defined the ‘before’ and ‘after’ of their existence, the single event that had changed them and their world forever.

‘Everything changed once the Americans came in, of course,’ Margo continues. ‘It would have gone on a lot longer if they hadn’t.’

She watches two students walking past. They are absorbed in their conversation and do not notice us.

‘I went with them into the camps in Poland and Germany later on.’

‘The American troops?’

She nods.

‘I served as a translator during the liberation.’

‘You went into the concentration camps?’ I ask, my fascination with Margo’s tale turning into horror.

She looks at me with concern.

‘It’s OK, Margo,’ I say, recovering my composure. ‘Please go on.’

Perhaps it is something she needs to talk about, I think to myself. But Margo only shakes her head.

‘After the war, I returned to France to find my sister Emily,’ she eventually continues. ‘My parents were already lost by then and she and her husband were living in Paris.’

‘She must have been very relieved to see you.’

Margo gives me a sidelong glance and a wry smile that lasts only seconds.

‘She wanted nothing to do with me, accused me of running away during the war just when the family needed me most and said I had been selfish and ungrateful. I couldn’t really argue with that. Still, I was shocked that she should feel that way about me. We were very different, she and I, but I always thought of us as close.’

‘Didn’t she know you had been working with the Resistance?’ I ask, feeling indignant for Margo’s sake. ‘She should have been proud of what you had done.’

She shrugs and blows smoke through her nostrils.

‘That wasn’t the way things worked out. Afterwards, I realized I would have to make my home somewhere else.’

‘Where did you go?’

‘I moved to London and eventually settled down. It was easier that way.’

She pauses.

‘I thought so much about going home after the war had ended that it took a bit of getting used to at first, being alone and in England. In the end I managed to find a way of life that worked for me and I was happy there for a while.’

‘But how did you end up coming to Beirut?’

‘Some time later, Fouad and his wife came to London for a visit and they invited me to return here with them for a holiday. I liked it so much that I didn’t really need them to persuade me to stay.’

I feel emboldened to talk about something I had been puzzling over since we first met.

‘It seems a strange place for you to end up in, though,’ I say quietly. ‘I mean, given your background and all the things that had happened to you. It’s not as though you had any connection to Lebanon.’

‘I had nothing to keep me here, no one to keep me here, that’s true. But that’s why I wanted to stay, I think. Besides, where else would I have gone after leaving London?’

There is a note of cynicism in her voice that surprises me. I sit back in my seat and look up at the leaves of a tree whose branches arch gently above the bench we are sitting on. They are a dark, polished green in places and have a soft silvery sheen about them in others. I am suddenly struck by the symmetry of their irregular shapes and the beauty in their contrasting colours.

I begin to wonder if Margo might now regret her decision to remain in Lebanon, especially given the political instability we are now experiencing.

‘So where do you feel you belong, Margo?’ I finally ask.

She drops her cigarette to the ground, puts it out with her shoe and pulls herself up with her stick.

‘Wherever I happen to be, sweetheart, whoever I happen to be with,’ she says. ‘With you here, now, and somewhere else later on. It’s all the same, after all, don’t you think?’

I laugh loudly.

‘You know that’s not how I feel, Margo,’ I protest, gesturing at the view before us. ‘This country is everything to me, this city. It’s where I grew up, where I became who I am.’

‘Mmm. But perhaps one day that feeling too will change in you.’

My uncle and his wife still live in the old neighbourhood by the American University, though they moved some years ago into a larger apartment that has a partial view of the Corniche and the sea beyond it. Every once in a while I visit and when the weather is fine, we relax on the balcony in the shade of a large beach umbrella and chat while the hum of traffic and people goes on below.

My cousins left home years ago, but my uncle and aunt remain a surprisingly forward-looking couple, unwilling to hark back to the miseries of the civil war and enjoying the here and now of Beirut days.

This city, my uncle insists every time I see him, is still the best place to be. It has everything and everyone I could ever need in it and more, he says.

Several years ago, he and his wife came to visit us in Australia and seemed to enjoy their holiday, but when the time came for them to leave and my father suggested they set up home there, my uncle adamantly refused. The civil war had just come to a shaky end and they were both anxious, he said, to get back and play a part in rebuilding Lebanon.

I did not know it then, but my uncle’s determination played a part in my own longing to return, and confirmed my conviction that what I had always seen as my roots on this earth were worth preserving, that in abandoning them I might also be losing the very qualities that defined me. How does one live, I began to ask myself, without a clear sense of self in a world where individuality is constantly being eroded?

‘You know, amou,’ I tell my uncle during one of our conversations on the terrace. The air is warm but not uncomfortably so. ‘In many ways you’re very different from my father.’

‘Oh?’

‘I mean you both grew up here, set up business and eventually married and had families. Yet he was prepared to give it all up and move away, without looking back once.’

I shake my head to emphasize my disapproval.

‘There’s no right or wrong in what we each chose to do, Layla,’ he says.

‘He left home and dragged his family away with him, without allowing anyone else a say in it.’

‘You were too young to make choices then, habibti, and your mother was very happy to leave the war behind. They did it for you, after all.’

‘You have children too,’ I protest. ‘Why did you decide to stay?’

He sits up and looks at me.

‘I suppose I couldn’t imagine myself and my family being happy anywhere else.’

‘Is it really as simple as that?’

He shrugs his shoulders and leans back in his chair.

‘Why don’t we just try to enjoy the afternoon and stop worrying about things we can do nothing about?’ he says not unkindly.

Would it take only a change of perspective to make me comfortable with myself wherever I happen to be, I wonder later. Could Margo be right, am I simply misleading myself in thinking that there is only one place, one way for me to be?

Margo is not old in my eyes. Her hair is white, her skin is furrowed and lined and the colour in her eyes seems to have faded to translucent, but her spirit is unblemished by age, as though in living so long and so much she has merely reverted to innocence and fooled the inevitable movement of time. It is strange but often, when we are together, I feel wiser and less vulnerable than she, the protector rather than the one in need of protection.

‘Margo, are you on your way somewhere?’

She is standing at the end of the alleyway leaning heavily on her stick and looking around her with some bewilderment.

‘Layla, sweetheart,’ she says, her voice anxious. ‘Fouad just dropped me off. He couldn’t find anywhere to park his car so I told him to go on home.’

‘Why don’t I walk with you up the stairs?’

I reach out to take her arm but she shakes her head.

‘I…I’m feeling suddenly tired, sweetheart. I think I need to rest for a moment.’

She is looking pale and I am concerned she might fall down. I knock on the door of one of the ground-floor flats and ask them for a chair.

‘I’m sorry for being so much trouble, sweetheart,’ she says, sitting down.

I hand her the glass of water that the neighbour has given me and she sips at it slowly.

‘Perhaps we should take you to see a doctor?’

‘Margo, are you alright?’ Fouad asks, walking into the alley.

He leans over to wrap an arm around Margo’s shoulders.

‘I found a parking spot further up the road,’ he says. ‘I didn’t want to leave you to walk up the stairs on your own.’

‘Please don’t fret you two,’ Margo says, patting Fouad’s arm. ‘I’m feeling better now.’

‘I’m glad you were here for her, Layla,’ Fouad says.

‘You are beginning to look better, Margo,’ I say. ‘The colour’s coming back into your cheeks.’

‘I was a bit worried there for a moment,’ Fouad says, looking at me. ‘We were on our way down from the mountains and Margo said she wasn’t feeling too well. But she wouldn’t let me stop at a doctor’s to have her checked.’

‘I’m a useless old thing sometimes, I know,’ Margo interrupts him. ‘But I’m perfectly alright now, and I’m ready to make my way up to the flat.’

‘I’ll come with you,’ Fouad insists, helping her up from the chair.

Margo looks at him and shakes her head.

‘Actually, I was on my way back upstairs,’ I say. ‘I just realized I’ve forgotten something. Why don’t I go with you, Margo?’

‘If you’re going to be with her, Layla, that’ll be fine. She’s always had a hard time accepting help anyway.’

He bends down and gives Margo a hug, then pulls away again, looking at her with a depth of tenderness that makes a deep impression on me.

Once upstairs, I ask Margo if she would like me to help her into the bedroom.

‘You know I’ve always thought of myself as self-sufficient,’ she says, shaking her head. ‘I suppose it’s easy to do when you’re young and strong, but old age changes all that.’

She laughs and I reach out to touch her hand.

‘I’m always here for you, Margo.’

‘Yes, I know, sweetheart. It’s just that sometimes I can’t help wishing…’

She looks down and brushes the front of her sweater with her hand.

‘You know, I never thought this would happen to me,’ she continues. ‘I always believed I would remain strong enough not to have to rely on anyone.’

She pauses and looks up at me again.

‘It’s ridiculous, isn’t it?’

On the outside landing, by Margo’s front door, is a plant pot perched on a stand. Inside it is a small nest and four baby birds, their disproportionately large and bare heads quivering on thin necks, their beaks wide open.

‘This is amazing,’ I exclaim, peering into the pot.

‘They hatched only a few days ago. The mother comes and goes all the time, feeding them and keeping them warm.’

‘She doesn’t mind you being around?’

Margo shakes her head.

‘Not so far, anyway. But I do try to be discreet.’

She motions for me to go inside.

‘She must have sensed she and the babies would be safe here,’ I begin as we take our seats in the living room.

Margo gives me a quizzical look.

‘Not many birds escape being shot here, Margo, despite the laws against it. The mother bird obviously realized that you would not harm them.’

I hesitate.

‘I’m not surprised, though,’ I continue. ‘It’s exactly how I feel whenever I come here, safe from harm. You are the most tolerant person I know, Margo.’

‘I’m glad you feel that way, sweetheart,’ she says with a smile. ‘Sometimes, though, I feel you think too well of me for my own good. I have done some very foolish things in my life, you know, things that I’m not proud of.’

‘I can’t imagine you doing anything bad, Margo. Mistakes are different. We all make those.’

‘Some mistakes can be deliberate.’ There is a hint of impatience in her voice. ‘When I think now of how I treated my parents while they were alive, of all those I’ve hurt in the past…I’m not trying to shock you but to encourage you to see people as they really are, my dear, even if you do love them. Particularly if you love them as you do.’

I begin to protest but Margo interrupts me.

‘At one point in my life, just after the war, I thought drinking was the best way of dealing with my problems. I drank so much that some days I’d wake up not knowing what I had done the night before or who the man or woman beside me was and I came very close once to killing myself.’

I shake my head.

‘You were lost and confused, at the time, Margo. So much had been lost despite the fact that you had all fought so hard for things to change for the better.’

Margo reaches for her cigarettes.

‘People are not always motivated by the right reasons,’ she says quietly. ‘Sometimes we do what seem like brave things only because we are too afraid to stop and look more closely within ourselves.’

I frown and watch as she attempts to light her cigarette with shaking hands. I should have known you when you were young and needed direction and the world did not seem big enough to contain the despair that threatened to overwhelm you.

I remember telling Margo one morning that I was planning to take students from my writing seminar out for a drink. I explained that I occasionally met with students outside the classroom in the hope that we would get to know one another better. Often, in this less formal environment, I am struck by a promise in them that I had not been aware of before. I was pleasantly surprised when she showed interest in meeting them.

‘I would love for them to meet you,’ I say. ‘Would you like to come with us?’

‘Why don’t you bring them here instead? We can serve food and drinks in the living room and those who want to can spill out onto the landing for more space.’

‘There are only seven of them so I suppose it would work,’ I say. ‘But wouldn’t it be too much trouble for you?’

She shakes her head.

‘I think I would enjoy having young people around the place. Even if it’s just for one evening.’

‘Alright, but I’ll prepare everything we need, Margo. I don’t want you to go to any trouble.’

The weather is mild the evening of the party. When I arrive, Margo’s front door is held open with a large pot that contains a young jasmine tree only just beginning to flower.

‘Is that new?’ I ask, gesturing towards the plant. ‘It smells wonderful.’

I place two large plastic bags filled with food and treats on the kitchen floor.

Margo smiles and nods.

‘I’ve put out some bowls and platters on the dining-room table for you to put the food in, sweetheart,’ she says.

‘Thank you, Margo. I’ll need to make some room in the fridge as well. They’ll be delivering the drinks soon.’

It usually takes time for us to relax and shake off the air of classroom formality, but not long after the students arrive the evening’s conversations begin in earnest. When I introduce them, I can see that my students are impressed by Margo, one or two of them not knowing quite how to react to this diminutive, elderly woman whose eyes look straight into theirs, unflinching and knowing. I also begin to see that Margo relies on that moment of hesitation her demeanour imposes on those who meet her for the first time to study them closely, while their guard is down. Still, there is kindness also in her assessment, I think, an acceptance of whatever it is she sees because she harbours no compulsion to captivate or even change it.

Half-way through the evening, I find one of my male students sitting next to Margo in her usual spot on the floor. They seem deep in conversation and I am curious to know what they might be talking about so I ease myself into the armchair opposite and wait to be invited to join them.

‘Here you are, sweetheart,’ Margo says, looking up at me.

Youssef is the one student I feel I have not quite managed to get through to. He is almost excessively serious and visibly withdraws into himself every time I try to get him to talk. Yet his writing reveals a remarkably profound inner life for one so young, even if it does tend to lack focus, and often leads him to go off on tangents that are more confused than creative. I have met with him several times in my office to give him the direction he needs to achieve his true potential, but with no success.

‘This young man is telling me how much he enjoys your classes, Layla,’ Margo says. ‘He says he finds them inspiring.’

I try not to look too surprised.

‘Youssef is a good student,’ I say with a half-smile. ‘I’d just like him to be more willing to participate in the classroom and listen to my advice once in a while.’

Youssef turns to me and frowns.

‘I think he finds it difficult to feel completely comfortable around others, don’t you?’ Margo says, reaching out to pat him gently on the arm before turning to me.

‘Some things cannot be forced, Layla,’ she continues with a firm voice.

There is such sympathy in her eyes and such relief in his that I am momentarily taken aback and am aware of having missed something crucial in this intimate exchange. I stand up and walk away, feeling as if I have been summarily dismissed by them.

Later, as I finish off the last of the washing up, Margo comes into the kitchen and stands by me at the sink.

‘Please sit down, Margo. It’s been a long evening and you must be very tired.’

‘I had a good time, Layla. Thank you for bringing them here.’

I reach out for a dish towel and change my mind.

‘Perhaps I’ll leave the washing up to dry itself on the rack,’ I say. ‘I’ll come back tomorrow morning to clear it all up. Is that OK?’

‘Of course it is, sweetheart. We’re both tired and should just head off to bed, I suppose.’

‘Thanks again for letting me have the party here, Margo,’ I say, heading to the front door. ‘It went even better than I thought it would.’

‘Layla,’ she calls after me.

‘Yes?’

‘It eventually gets easier, you know, as long as you don’t try so hard to make everything better.’

I am uncertain of what she is trying to tell me at first.

‘Does it really?’ I ask.

She smiles and shakes her head.

‘Perhaps a time will come, my darling girl, when you will feel the release in simply accepting some things as they are without trying to change them.’

‘And rely only on happenstance?’

‘But isn’t that what it ultimately means to be trusting, Layla?’

I have noticed, once or twice, a man in our building who seems familiar, yet I cannot remember ever having met or spoken to him. He is of medium height and wears glasses and has a small beard that is flecked with grey and I am drawn by an air of resignation about him that I sometimes think might instead be an indication of humility.

Perhaps it is this impression of reticence that I recognize in him, I think one morning when we meet on the stairs. We nod at one another and I smile. The encounter, however brief, makes me determined to try to strike up a conversation with him next time we see one another, though I don’t really understand why that should be so, nor why this man should seem so appealing to me.

Margo and I often speak about lovers in our very different pasts, my experiences seeming more awkward than authentic, poor substitutes for what I imagine would be the real thing, the passion and the romance. Whenever she talks about her husband John, a picture emerges in my mind of the intensity of a love that, had circumstances been different, might not have lasted. Relationships that endure, I tell Margo, like those of my parents or my uncle and his wife, seem to have an element of the mundane about them that I know I would find unacceptable.

There is a professor of music at the university, a man with a mane of dark, thick hair and a voice so resonant that he seems sometimes to sing as he speaks, who intrigued me when we met. But the first time I went into his office and noticed the dust-free shelves lined with books in descending size, the neat desk and empty in and out trays placed at precise angles on its surface, and the general impression of tidiness taken to a disconcerting extreme, I longed to get out again.

Margo and I laughed about it afterwards. She said she was surprised I had not yet realized that men tended to be creatures of habit, surrounding themselves with a sense of security that is based on objects and rituals rather than emotions. Was your John like that? I asked her then. She fell silent for a moment. He probably would have been, if he had lived, she eventually answered. Would you have loved him still, I persisted. Perhaps even more, she said quietly, and I failed to understand what she meant at the time.

When she speaks about herself, Margo tells me it’s like peeling away the many layers of an onion to arrive at its essence. There is so much hidden away from view, she says, that even when I think I have finally arrived at some kind of truth, there is another lurking beneath it.

I watch her as she cups her hands, holds them together and opens them up again, and imagine the process as endless, hidden levels of meaning that once arrived at become instantly out of reach.

‘It never stops, this self-searching, then?’ I ask.

Margo smiles wryly.

‘Even for someone as old as I am, sweetheart.’

I long ago sensed Margo’s ability for detachment, not only because there are some things about her life that I will never know and am not in any case prepared to probe, but also because she manages to maintain a distance from the events and people she encounters that comes from being older and so far removed from immediate concerns.

Still, she is also marvellously adept at living in the moment, at making of everything and everyone around her a discovery.

‘We have lost the ability,’ Margo repeats again and again, ‘to simply stop and stare.’

I feel that with Margo I am encountering truths that would otherwise have eluded me, depths of being which I might not have been able to reach on my own. In accepting the people and circumstances that surround her, she shows me the way of compassion, and in being so steadfast, she gives me courage. Whenever I attempt to voice these feelings to her, I eventually find myself giving up because I know they would lose too much in the telling.

Once, standing together in the hallway of Margo’s flat, I tell her that she has remained innocent in her dealings with others, despite her age and all that had happened to her.

‘At times, you seem almost like a child to me, Margo,’ I say. ‘It’s almost as if at some point in your life, you simply gave up being certain about anything at all.’

I hesitate, suddenly unsure.

‘But perhaps I have been unable to fully understand you,’ I continue.

Margo leans against the wall and makes her way slowly towards the front door. When she eventually turns around to look at me, there are tears in her eyes. I reach out and touch her cheek with one hand.

‘Oh. Oh, my dear friend,’ I say, shaking my head.

I notice him at the butcher’s one morning, both of us waiting to be served. I catch his eye and smile but when I attempt to approach him, he is already on his way out of the shop. I cannot shake off the feeling that I know him from somewhere.

A few days later, I go to a bookshop not far from the university and my suspicions are confirmed. He is a well-known writer who is greatly admired in this part of the world and I have read three of his most celebrated books.

I choose a novel by him that was recently translated into English. On the back, there are quotes from critics who describe it as ‘moving’ and ‘one of this excellent writer’s best books yet’, as well as a head shot of him in his younger days when he did not have a moustache or a beard.

When I arrive at his doorstep, there are no plants outside the front door, nor any other sign of welcome. I ring the bell and hear a faint shuffling inside before he opens the door.

‘Hello,’ I say with a smile. ‘I’m Layla, your neighbour from upstairs.’

I put out my hand and shake his. He appears too surprised to say anything, his eyebrows are raised slightly and his lips are held tightly together.

‘I hope I’m not disturbing you,’ I continue, beginning to feel nervous.

He remains silent.

‘I’m sorry. I expect you must be working and I interrupted you.’

He begins to say something when he looks down at the book in my hand.

‘I wondered if you would sign this for me.’ I lift it up for him to see.

He nods but does not smile.

‘Yes, of course,’ he says finally. ‘Please come in.’

He leads me into the small entrance hall and turns to go into the living room.

‘I have one if you like,’ I say, handing him a pen.

A smell of burnt bread permeates the air.

‘I’m sorry,’ he says, opening the book and laying it on the hall table. ‘What did you say your name was?’

‘Layla,’ I say softly.

He bends down to write.

‘I hope you enjoy it.’ He hands the book back to me. ‘Although I have written two others since, you know.’

‘Yes, I know. I haven’t read this one yet, though.’

He nods and gives me back the pen.

‘There was something else I wanted to ask you.’

He looks taken aback.

‘I teach at the American University. I wondered if you would be willing to come and give a talk to my students. It’s a literature course. I know a number of your books have been translated into English and I’d like my students to become familiar with your work.’

He takes off his glasses and rubs his eyes.

‘It’s something to think about,’ he says, putting his glasses back on again. ‘Although I’m not particularly good at giving talks, you know.’

Then he accompanies me to the front door, opens it and finally smiles as I step out onto the landing.

I turn to shake his hand and repeat my thanks but he has already shut the door behind me. On my way back upstairs, I feel disappointed, as though I have been let down, not so much by the writer but by my own awkwardness.

Once inside my apartment, I open the book. His writing is small, the letters even and clean. From Kamal, it says, To Layla and future friendship.

I arrive at Margo’s and find her rummaging through the bottom drawer of the big dresser in the living room. I clear my throat and she looks up at me.

‘The front door was open, Margo. I knocked but you didn’t hear me.’

‘Come in, sweetheart. I’m just looking for something.’

‘Shall I put the coffee on or would you like some help?’

She sits back on the floor.

‘I thought I had a photograph of John here somewhere. I wanted to show it to you.’

‘Oh?’

‘We were in a café with a group of friends and someone took a picture of us. I was sure it was here.’

I sit down beside her. The contents of the drawer are tangled up together, piles of papers and photographs and notebooks and other bits and pieces.

‘Why don’t I try to sort through all of this for you?’

I look at her and see hesitation in her eyes.

‘But these might be private things,’ I say hurriedly. ‘I’m sorry, Margo.’

‘No, no, it’s alright. I just…It’s all such a mess.’

‘We can do it together. What do you think?’

We begin by taking everything out and making separate piles. Things that look like official documents which I try not to read despite my curiosity, and others such as receipts for electricity and telephone bills which I place in a manila envelope and tell Margo to keep. There are also a number of books which Margo agrees should go on the shelves in her bedroom, and in the far corner of the drawer, a thick wad of money kept together with a rubber band.

‘There are a lot of dollars here, Margo. Are you sure it’s safe to keep them in this drawer?’

She shrugs.

‘It’s for emergencies. Someone might need it one day.’

‘Oh, Margo. You’ve been giving your money away again, haven’t you?’

‘I’ve got plenty of it, sweetheart.’

‘You need to hang on to it for yourself. You may need it one day.’

She gives me one of her sidelong glances.

‘You mean if I want to suddenly up and leave here or become incapacitated and have to go into a home?’

‘No, of course not. I would never let that happen to you.’

‘The only way I’m leaving this place is in a box, Layla. This is the last home I’ll ever have.’

I sit back and shake my head.

‘I hope that won’t be for some time yet, Margo. I need you.’

‘Yes, I know you do, but you won’t be alone always, darling.’

We do not find the photograph of John among those we go through. There are pictures of Margo as a child with her mother and sister and others of her when she was a young woman, either portraits or group shots with friends. She points to a few of the faces and tells me who they are but otherwise says very little and I do not try to push her.

I remember a fisherman when I was a child who spent hours every morning untangling his net after a night’s fishing just offshore. His small boat bobbing up and down in the tiny marina at the end of the Corniche near my home, he sat on a wooden stool puffing on a cigarette that was lodged between his lips as he worked, occasionally taking it out to sip on a cup of coffee placed on the ground by his feet.

He fascinated me, not only because of his tanned, leathery skin, his wild grey hair and the way his small eyes shone like pebbles whenever he looked up from his net, but also because he seemed so nonchalant, so detached from everything around him.

I mustered the courage one morning to go right up to him and, when he did not object, sat down on a rock and watched him at work. He looked at me and grunted but said nothing, turning his attention back to his net, his coffee and cigarette. I allowed myself to look closely at him then, the huge chafed knuckles of his hands and his gnarled feet in plastic slippers, toenails thick and yellow and unevenly cut.

‘Do they hurt?’ I suddenly blurted out.

The fisherman looked up, his eyebrows raised.

‘What?’ he asked with a gruff voice.

I froze with fear.

‘What did you say?’ he repeated.

‘I just wondered if your feet hurt. They…they look funny.’

He frowned hard, looked down at his feet and wiggled his toes.

‘A bit stiff but they’re fine,’ he said.

The butt of his cigarette fell to the ground as he spoke and I hurriedly stepped on it to put it out.

‘You could have started a fire,’ I muttered, shaking my head.

The old man burst out laughing then and I found myself giggling in return.

‘Cheeky thing,’ he said, reaching out to pat me on the head.

We became fast friends after that, though he only ever muttered a greeting when I arrived at the marina to meet him on Saturday mornings, and when we did make conversation it was always brief and to the point. I asked him about his nightly fishing trips on the dark, rolling sea and about what it felt like to be out there on his own and whether he would take me out with him on his excursions. The water at night is as thick and as smooth as blood and anyone who fell into it would be swallowed up in no time, he replied with a mischievous grin. I shuddered at the thought but still did not give up the notion that anything was possible, even for me, if only I were brave enough to attempt it.

It is late afternoon and the Corniche is bathed in soft light.

‘I grew up one street away from here,’ I say, pointing away from the main road. ‘I used to come to the Corniche with my friends to play. There was an old fisherman I made friends with, at that small marina just under the bridge there. I wonder what’s happened to him.’

Margo stops to look in the direction I am pointing, then she makes her way to one of the concrete benches that line the pavement and sits down.

I motion to a vendor on a bicycle to stop and I buy two pieces of kaak from him.

I sit down next to Margo, make a hole in each of the layered pieces of bread and fill them with the thyme and sesame seed mixture that comes with them.

‘Here you go, Margo,’ I say, handing her the kaak.

By dusk parents with strollers are walking leisurely up and down the pavement. Looking around me, I am once again struck by the mix of people, elderly men in fold-out chairs, veiled women alongside others in body-hugging jeans and tight T-shirts, young children on their bicycles, joggers with their iPods blotting out the world and, out on the rocks, fishermen with their rods and tackle. There are vendors also, either carrying their wares on their backs or standing next to large wooden carts from which they sell green almonds dipped in salt, boiled corn on the cob, pumpkin seeds and peanuts in the shell and Beirut’s version of brioche and other pastries.

‘This is the one place everyone can enjoy,’ Margo says as if reading my mind. ‘That’s one of the reasons I chose to live in this part of the city when I decided to settle here.

‘At first, I stayed with friends who have an old house up in the mountains with a beautiful garden. I’ve told you about them, haven’t I? Fouad and his wife May. I loved it up there and stayed for several months before eventually coming down to Beirut.’

I nod. I have heard this story before, although Margot seems to have forgotten that I have met her friend Fouad before.

‘That first walk on the Corniche was something,’ Margo smiles. ‘Like being in the south of France again, although it’s a lot less polished here, of course.’

We look to the right, to the hills and mountains in the distance. It is a clear spring day and except for a small area of white on the highest summit, most of the winter snow is gone.

‘This is beautiful but I love the mountains too,’ I sigh. ‘I dream of having a small house there one day, somewhere I can go to breathe fresh air and quiet.’

‘Do you imagine a solitary life for yourself then, sweetheart?’

I turn to her.

‘What choice do I have? I’ve never been successful at relationships, you know that, Margo. Besides, as I get older it seems even less likely that I’ll meet a man I can really be with.’

Margo looks down and brushes some crumbs off her lap.

‘I don’t like to think of you always being on your own,’ she says quietly.

‘What kind of life do you wish for me then?’ I smile.

‘You will have a man to love you and children of your own too. It will all come when the time is right, I’m sure of that.’

Two young boys run past the bench, one of them tripping and falling down. Before I can stand up to help, he quickly picks himself up again and walks away with a slight limp. When I turn to Margo again, I realize that she looks very fragile today and feel my heart skip a beat.

‘What about you, Margo? Is this the kind of life that you wished for yourself?’

‘What makes you ask me that now, sweetheart?’

I hesitate and reach out to touch her arm.

‘Have you really been happy here, after all? Sometimes I think that maybe it’s not about place but just you, Margo. So many people come to you to be comforted, but do you have anyone to listen to you when you need solace?’

The myriad sounds of the Corniche continue around us, the sea a deep, even blue with almost no sign of waves in it.

Margo sighs.

‘You’re right, Layla, it’s not about place,’ she says, her voice trembling a little. ‘It never is about where you are or even the people you happen to be with. But somehow I don’t think I’ve really managed to help you understand that.’

‘I know wherever I choose to live will have advantages and disadvantages, Margo,’ I say a little impatiently. ‘I’m not that unperceptive, you know.’

‘No, of course you’re not.’

I clear my throat, hoping I have not offended Margo with my retort, and pick up the piece of kaak in my lap. I take a large bite from it, the sharp scent of the thyme inside it filling my nostrils. I am surprised to feel tears in my eyes and blink them back hurriedly so that she will not see them.

‘So what is it then, Margo?’ I try to smile as I ask the question. ‘What is it that I need to know to be really happy?’

She opens her hands out in front of her as if she were preparing to say a prayer.

‘More and more these days,’ she begins slowly, ‘when I look back on all the things I have done with my time, I understand that regret is, after all, futile.’

She places her hands in her lap once again.

‘What matters, sweetheart, is not what you do but how you do it, whether or not you give life the passion and seriousness it deserves and whether you have the courage and honesty to do this, not just every now and then, but every moment, right until the very end.’

She pauses.

‘It’s as hard as that?’ I finally ask.

Margo laughs.

‘Or as simple as taking pleasure in all of this,’ she says, gesturing at the scene around us. ‘As easy as finally letting go.’