Agneta has other tasks to deal with and no time to babysit a new intern, so she excuses herself and disappears with echoing steps down the stairwell towards the street. It leaves Jacob feeling a mixture of disappointment and relief.
None of this is turning out like his fantasies this summer, but at least his apartment is beyond anything he could have hoped for.
Besides, it feels good to be on his own. He opens the double doors to the noise of Armenia Street and sees Agneta climbing into the Volvo. She turns up to him and waves.
‘I forgot to tell you to talk to your upstairs neighbour about the generator,’ she yells. ‘There’s a note on the table in the living room. Electricity can be a problem. Call me if you can’t figure it out.’
And then she’s gone. Jacob sits down on one of the plastic chairs on the balcony, lets the heat and smog and the cacophony of honking traffic and loud voices wash over him. This is his home until Christmas. This city. This apartment. For a moment he feels no joy or satisfaction at all, just a sense of rootlessness that steals over him, empties him until he’s gasping for breath with his eyes closed.
He’s alone. As alone as he felt in Uppsala in his shabby sublet room on Rackarberget during the first few weeks of his new life there. After everything he’s gone through to get here. And for what? For this emptiness and futility? He takes out his phone and finds Simon’s text message.
It would be so easy to answer. To write: ‘Yes, babe! When are you coming to visit?’ To just let go and let everything he still feels for Simon bubble up. Maybe it would grow? Maybe it’s enough to live a life in a tasteful one-bedroom in the inner city of Stockholm. Simon would get a job at some museum or art auction house. Jacob would work as an analyst at a PR agency. Or maybe he could build a career at a ministry that would include short trips to Brussels. Maybe he would even tell Simon the truth about himself.
Maybe, maybe, maybe.
But he knows that’s impossible, that’s not the life he’s striving for. There’s more out there. Bigger missions. His heart pounds.
He swallows heavily and forces the emptiness down deep inside. With a few quick clicks, he deletes Simon’s message. And with a few more, he deletes Simon from his phone.
*
It’s dark by the time he realizes he forgot to ask the neighbour about the electricity, which is just as unreliable as Agneta indicated. When he does reach Alexa, which is apparently her name, using the number the French diplomat left on the kitchen table, she tells him nobody will be able to fix the generator until tomorrow morning.
‘But come up to the roof,’ she says. ‘There’s a terrace. And wine.’
The lights don’t work in the stairwell either, so Jacob fumbles forward using just faint light spilling in through the open windows on each landing. It gets dark so fast, not at all like Sweden. He didn’t even notice the dusk, and it’s no later than six.
Light suddenly returns to the staircase with a burst of yellow and a humming light bulb, just as he’s pushing a wrought-iron gate onto what has to be the shared roof terrace.
‘Ah,’ says the voice from the phone somewhere in the darkness. ‘Praise be to the utility company! The power is back on.’
Jacob takes a couple of hesitant steps onto the roof. In front of him the neighbourhood of Mar Mikhael stretches out and down towards the harbour. Dim lights in windows, broken walls, and loading cranes and then a vast darkness that has to be the Mediterranean.
‘You must be Jacob,’ Alexa says. ‘Welcome to Beirut.’
She steps out of the shadows and before Jacob can say a word she’s kissed him on both cheeks and put a glass of red wine in his hand.
‘Is this your first visit?’
Jacob nods slowly and looks at her. She’s probably ten years older than him and about his height. She’s not exactly overweight, more like solidly built, with a halo of dark, curly hair that she has pulled back from her face with a wide reddish scarf. She’s wearing a long, green dress and sandals.
‘Let me guess,’ she says. ‘This is your first time in the Middle East? You’re shocked and just a little worried about all this mess?’
She laughs and tilts her head to the side. Jacob’s mouth goes dry, and he can feel his face flush. She’s treating him like a child, like some raw, naive newcomer. This is not what he imagined for his first evening. He expected an embassy, not electricity flickering on and off, not some rooftop with this woman.
Alexa laughs and puts an arm around him.
‘Drink, habibi,’ she says. ‘It’ll pass. When you’re done drinking, you can help me carry up the food. It’s better not to think.’
Jacob drinks a glass, then one more and then another, while helping Alexa transport plates and dishes up from her apartment. It’s her farewell party apparently. She’s going to start working at a youth centre in the Palestinian refugee camp of Shatila in southern Beirut next week. While they set the table, she tells him she’s from France and Morocco and that she’s lived in Beirut for almost five years.
‘I started as an intern at the Red Cross,’ she says. ‘Putain, what a bunch of whores. Watch out for diplomats, baby.’
She stops and puts her hand to her mouth.
‘Sorry, I didn’t mean… Well, you’re just an intern? You still have some time to reconsider.’
But Jacob laughs. He doesn’t care, he just wants her to keep talking in an English that blends Arabic and French and flows like a wild river of swear words and strong opinions. Every word she speaks lessens the emptiness inside him. With every glass he drinks, he feels more inspired.
The terrace slowly fills up with people in jeans and dresses speaking a hundred different languages. Alexa lights the candles standing in empty wine bottles from the Beqaa valley, and they flicker in the breeze. Somebody manages to get a small generator running and a string of naked incandescent bulbs are strung along one wall. A stereo is plugged in and Arabic pop mixes with The Weeknd and Rihanna. Jacob fills his glass and his body starts to feel lighter even though he’s so confused, he barely even remembers how to speak English any more.
But for once, it doesn’t matter. For once he might just be able to let go and fall into or rise up to something he doesn’t totally understand, but which makes his head feel lighter, his heart beat harder, makes him move faster, with greater intention and direction.
This, this is why he left everything he knew behind. This was why he went to Uppsala. This is why he reads foreign newspapers and studies political science, and this is why he has to take that damn statistics exam and learn Arabic.
This roof is the kind of place he’s longed for, searched for without even knowing it. This is the adventure. This is where it happens. This is where you become someone else. He’s so close to blurting out this ridiculous idea that he decides to drink a glass of water and sober up. It’s only his first night, he has to keep it together, not be seduced by cosmopolitan magic; he has to keep his eyes on the prize, the embassy, make a good impression there.
But right now he feels so happy in the company of the foreigners here, the anonymity, maybe even the safety of it, secure in the insecurity, in the uncertainty. So instead of water he grabs a beer out of a barrel, where it is lying on ice, just like in a movie. He thinks: Fuck it. That’s just how this night will be. One night. Then focus.
He walks to the edge of the terrace and looks out over the city, run down, broken, missing walls, bullet holes, the injustice and chaos and confusion and beyond that the Mediterranean lying in the darkness. He can’t see it, but he knows it’s there.
He feels like he could put his beer down on the ground next to him, climb onto the concrete ledge in front of him, take aim at one of the ten towering cranes down below, stretch his arms out like wings and fly.
And then he hears a voice close beside him. First he lurches in surprise. He can barely hear the party any more, barely hear someone strumming ‘Redemption Song’ on a guitar. Has almost forgotten there is a party, that there are other people here at all.
‘You look like you’re about to take off?’
He turns to the voice. And somehow he knows before even turning, before seeing the face that belongs to that voice, from this moment on everything will change. There’s no going back, no past, only future. Nothing will ever be the same again.
Then he sees those eyes, the smile in them, and more than that, Jacob feels like he’s seen them before. And he says as much: ‘Have we met?’
His English feels shaky, his accent so Swedish despite struggling for a cool British sound. But those eyes just smile at him. He knows they haven’t met, he’s just dreamed about this moment, what it would be like to look into eyes like those. He almost falls backwards, not smoothly like a bird, but clumsily, like a badly trained clown, and if the hand that belonged to that voice hadn’t grabbed his left arm maybe he would have stumbled over the ledge and down into a coal-black Lebanese night.
‘Careful,’ the voice says. ‘Don’t disappear, we haven’t even met yet.’