The route to the mall is a combination of glitzy buildings and unkempt roads. Souad had visited Beirut in previous summers, but when she and the children arrived a few weeks ago, past midnight on a Friday, it felt different. Exhausted, they’d woven through airplane lines, endured the long wait in airport control, which concluded with the security officer saying, as soon as Souad spoke Arabic, “You’re not Lebanese,” as plainly as though he were stating the sun was hot. When they finally made it to the arrivals gate, Karam was waiting. It was a striking, ethereal landscape as they drove home—the bullet-riddled buildings, glimpses of coastline, billboards whizzing by, the pictures alternating between women posing in lingerie and grave-looking men.
It is the same here, on the road to the mall. One advertisement shows a woman holding a cigarette with the lines La belle époque est arrivé emblazoned below, while other buildings are papered with flyers of men with liquid, haunting eyes. Martyrs, she thinks.
Of all the things in this new country—the precipitous streets, the electricity cuts, the war still etched into the city’s skin—this is what frightens her most. The men on the posters—the dead, or the ones hungry for death. Their frenetic, glassy eyes are identical to the hijackers’, whose faces are burned into her memory as though it happened yesterday, Elie coming home early, huddling in front of the television with her, both watching the ash and fire and collapsing buildings on a loop.
Souad watched the towers fall for days. The world was addicted to watching; over and over, they were reborn, made whole and silver and resplendent, only to crumple into themselves again. Each time felt like the first time, the destruction so immense it bordered on the majestic. Souad watched the dust-fogged streets, people’s panicked faces as they shrieked for those they loved. She felt her heart move with the shaking cameras. Smoke and fire spilled from the buildings like blood from a gunshot wound, and people began to jump, their little bodies unreal as they lurched from the sky, dolls in someone’s nightmare. One newscaster played the recording of an emergency call, a woman’s voice frantic as she begged the operator for help. Souad tried to imagine what she could’ve said to this woman, what anyone could say, what the operator himself finally said. I’m sorry, oh God, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry. For weeks, Souad touched her legs, ears, face, her aliveness, imagined herself in that building, looking out of a window, wondering how it felt to realize that you were dying. That you were already dead.
Souad felt the falling of those men and women; she felt the human ache of watching that plummet. What does any of it mean, she wanted to ask, when you are a body, a body you suddenly love, a body that is tumbling through the air?
“They’re jumping” was all she’d actually said to Elie that long-ago night, and he shook his head, his eyes red. He clutched her body to his—for weeks they were fine after that, a second honeymoon, though it proved temporary, which must’ve happened in many homes across the country—and kissed her temple, whispering something she hadn’t caught. I love you. Or Wouldn’t you?
If we go, Souad had told her children, we’ll be free. We’ll make a new life. An old friend of hers helped her find a job at the American University, as an adjunct lecturer teaching an English introduction course to freshmen. It is a straightforward syllabus, uninspiring, with a meager salary, since she doesn’t have a doctorate—has, in fact, only a barely completed undergraduate degree in design, which she cobbled together over a string of nighttime classes and online workshops, a thankless task that took her six years—but still she is grateful.
Sometimes she sits on the balcony floor, smoking alone, smoking not for the nicotine but for the simple pleasure of watching smoke rise into a series of helixes and curlicues in the dark. The noise downstairs, even in the middle of night, of honking cars and people arguing and laughing doesn’t bother her. Her heart rises with the sound of Arabic. If she shuts her eyes, it is as though she is sitting in the café downstairs, men having conversations around her, and she doesn’t have to speak, doesn’t have to say a single word to be with them.
She had missed the muezzin, the food, even her own tongue faltering in Arabic. In Beirut, she has gone back to being Palestinian. To everyone from the cabdrivers to the bank tellers, her accent exposes her. It reminds her of Kuwait. As a girl, this cataloging of origins never struck her as strange; Kuwait was a place of expatriation and everyone seemed to come from somewhere else. Elie had his Lebanon, Budur her Iraq. Even if a person’s heritage was flimsy, unused for years, you were where your father was from.
America wasn’t like that. You became what you coveted. Memories were short. She met Mexicans, Germans, Libyans, who spoke accented English but responded, From here, whenever asked. Souad became brown. People’s eyes glazed over when she tried to explain that, yes, she’d lived in Kuwait, but no, she wasn’t Kuwaiti, and no, she had never been to Palestine, but yes, she was Palestinian. That kind of circuitous logic had no place over there.
After the towers fell, other passengers on the T eyed her, but living in a liberal suburb meant people were kinder about it. Tell us if you need anything, the playdate mothers would say. If anyone’s rude to you. Outside of Boston, she felt it more. During a trip to Texas once to visit a friend, she and Budur stopped at a gas station for cigarettes. Souad felt the clerks’ gaze—two young Midwestern men, eyes like icepicks—on them the entire time. One of the men flung the change at her, several coins falling to the ground. Souad’s fear was like a bell, waking her. As they were leaving, she caught the words terrorist and bitch and a burst of laughter.
“The Undertaker is going to win.”
“No way! He’s so weak. Triple X is going to beat him.”
“Nuh-uh. You’ll see, he’s a loser.”
“Only because he cheats! Remember last time, he hit Shawn Michaels with a chair and the referee didn’t see him.”
“That referee was stupid!”
“You’re stupid!”