It all happens fast; maybe it’s the alcohol or the trip or the party. But it’s not just that, it’s something more, something else. Something about those eyes, that look. Some gleam of adventure in them.
‘I’ll be by the stairs,’ the voice says quite close to Jacob’s ear. ‘It’s better if we aren’t seen leaving together.’
He nods, but he doesn’t know which stairs the voice is referring to. The stairs in this building? Some other stairs? But the man has already turned around and is heading towards the door.
‘Wait!’ Jacob says and grabs his shoulder. ‘Which stairs?’
The man turns around, his expression still warm, but he’s no longer smiling, and something flashes in those eyes when he glances down to where Jacob is holding his shoulder. Jacob feels guilty, as if he’s committed some inexcusable mistake, and perhaps he has. He read that it’s illegal here, what the two of them are obviously up to. The police usually ignore it, but if you’re unlucky or if they want to hurt you, you can be arrested for being gay. Thrown in prison, deported, subjected to humiliating medical exams. Jacob pulls his hand back.
‘Sorry,’ he mumbles.
The man smiles again, just a little, and bends towards him. ‘You’re new to Beirut,’ he says. ‘I understand. Take a left on Armenia Street, go fifty metres, it will be on your left side. The colourful stairs that lead up to Ashrafieh. Hurry.’
And with that, he’s gone.
It doesn’t take Jacob long to find Alexa, and thank her for the wine and the party. She smiles and kisses him on both cheeks.
‘Just promise me you won’t turn into a real diplomat,’ she says.
That ‘real’ stings a bit, but Jacob lets it pass. He doesn’t want to be seen as somebody who’s not ‘real’. And besides, what does Alexa know? She’s just a hippie, right? But he promises to try, smiles indulgently, and feels like the naturalness of his smile is proof of an innate talent for diplomacy that will take him far.
‘Here,’ Alexa says, pushing a business card into his hand. ‘In case I don’t have time to say goodbye tomorrow. If you ever want to visit me. Just call first, baby. Shatila is a labyrinth. You’ll disappear there if you don’t know what you’re doing.’
She kisses him on the cheek again, and Jacob smells wine and garlic and also a sort of natural self-confidence on her breath. She steps back and looks deep into his eyes.
‘Beirut is not Sweden, habibi,’ she says. ‘Be careful. About everything.’
*
A few minutes later he’s stumbling over the broken cobblestones and concrete of Armenia Street, past the bars on the narrow sidewalks where parties spill out into stationary traffic. Honking and revving motorcycles. Calvin Harris and Arabic pop music, which sounds like nothing he’s ever heard before. He feels confused and exhilarated and exhausted – like he might never sleep again.
The man from the terrace was right: the stairs are only fifty metres further down the street, each step painted in red, green, blue, black, yellow, forming an abstract pattern that leads straight up into the darkness and another part of town. Ashrafieh. Mar Mikhael, where he lives, is a working-class neighbourhood; Ashrafieh is for the rich, Christian elite.
Jacob sees the man standing halfway up the stairs and raises a hand in an eager, childish greeting. The man smiles and calmly waves him up. Jacob stops for a moment. He shouldn’t be doing this. Not on his first night in Beirut. He should say: ‘We’ll talk some other day.’ He should sleep and focus on his career and his new life. What he’s dreamed about ever since he started dreaming. Call Agneta early and ask if he can go in to the embassy, show them his resourcefulness, his sense of duty, his abilities.
He should, he should, he should.
But he knows he won’t do that, and as soon as he takes the first step onto the staircase he has to hold himself back from running up to the man.
*
They walk in darkness down the street above the stairs. Jacob is still winded; the stairs were longer than they looked. It’s unusually quiet up here in the middle of the night – not even the honking on Armenia Street makes it all the way up here. They walk in the middle of the street, because here among the crumbling art deco houses there’s no traffic, not now – this isn’t the Beirut Jacob saw earlier in the day, this is another city. Still chaotic, but calmer, with empty streets and alleys. Abandoned perhaps, a city after an evacuation or an apocalypse.
At first they say nothing to each other. Jacob feels like he’s lost his voice, or has suddenly forgotten how to formulate words and sentences. There’s so much he’d like to say, so much he’d like to ask or discuss, but he’s giddy and excited and tired, and this moment is so crisp and brittle that language might destroy it, words and sentences and subject matter might ruin it, change it, shift it up or down, or just cause it to disappear completely.
So he stays silent, and they walk side by side in the same direction, even though Jacob has no idea where they’re headed. He doesn’t even know where they are. They zigzag between the hundreds of dusty cars parked on the sidewalks, glancing at each other now and then, while avoiding each other’s eyes. Jacob’s thoughts dart back and forth, searching desperately for the right words to begin. There should be a thousand things, but his brain is too fast, and it stumbles over every idea, never able to focus on just one. Finally, he gives up completely, just lets things be as they are, realizes he has no control over anything now, nothing at all, just has to follow. It’s an unfamiliar feeling. He never loses control of himself. One night in Beirut, and he’s already fallen. Suddenly they stop at a garden hidden behind a rusty iron fence. Jacob can just make out a large house behind it, a palace in the darkness. He bends forward to peer between the rails of the fence. Gardens and parks are apparently quite rare in Beirut. He read that the American University campus is the closest thing to a park that Beirut has. He clears his throat.
‘What is this place?’ he asks.
He regrets it immediately, because his English sounds so Swedish and childish in his ears, the question so flat and silly, and he wishes he could take it back, had stuck to saying nothing at all.
But the man standing next to him, the man who has eyes Jacob recognizes though he’s never seen them before, just laughs and shrugs his shoulders and follows the fence, drumming his fingers along it.
‘I don’t know,’ he says. ‘Some rich family that fled during the war?’ He turns and looks at Jacob. ‘It doesn’t matter. Tonight it’s ours, habibi.’
They stand in front of a warped, high gate locked with a chain. The man bends down, pulls the gate and succeeds in creating a small opening near the ground.
‘See if you can squeeze in there,’ he says.
Jacob doesn’t say a word or even hesitate, just falls down on his knees and crawls through the little gap into the garden. Right now he doesn’t care what the consequences are; he doesn’t care about anything except making sure this continues.
As soon as he’s through, he grabs onto the bottom of the gate, bending it up so that the man can crawl in over the broken cobblestones between which yellow grass is sticking up.
Then they’re both in the garden. The man points to a lopsided wooden bench under a magnolia tree weighed down by heavy flowers that almost glow in the dark. They sit down there. They both open their mouths at the same time, then laugh, fall silent, then try again.
‘My name is Jacob,’ Jacob says.
He turns to the man next to him, who is finally looking straight into his eyes. ‘My name is Yassim,’ he says.
*
Jacob has never snuck into parks late at night or sought out many hook-ups on Grindr. How could he have? His ambitions have been higher and more narrowly defined. It’s not that he hasn’t fantasized about it; in high school it was the only thing he thought about while surfing restlessly on his phone in bed, the sound of his own blood rushing in his ears. All the sites and images and films dampened it, allowing him to temporarily find release and some imitation of satisfaction. But to seek it out for real? Back then? It would have been impossible. It wasn’t until Uppsala and Simon that it actually… became real? And it wasn’t what he’d thought it would be. Not like this, whatever this is.
He looks around. He’s never been in a place like this one. He’s never seen a darkness that crackles and shivers and trembles like this. He breathes shallowly, cautiously, barely at all. He doesn’t really know why, but it’s as if a single deep breath might disrupt something fundamental, some law of nature, that has turned the world upside down.
He glances at the man sitting next to him, whose name is apparently Yassim. He has stubble on his chin, black, medium-length, wavy hair, a white T-shirt, well-worn jeans. He looks like a thousand other people, Jacob thinks. Why is this happening? What is it about Yassim? What is it about his gaze and voice that brought Jacob here, that makes him lose control and follow after a feeling he’s never experienced before?
When Yassim turns to him, Jacob doesn’t turn away like he did earlier. He meets his eyes. He holds his breath, and it’s as if blood no longer pumps through his body, as if everything is completely still. He clears his throat, tries to smile.
‘Those flowers are odd,’ Yassim says, and it’s barely more than a whisper. ‘Magnolias usually bloom in the spring.’
A gentle breeze Jacob didn’t notice before whispers through the top of the tree and a few white petals, soft as silk, land on his hand. There’s a swish as bats dive in under the high branches and disappear.
Something loosens inside him, a lock silently opens, and it’s as if a part of him is now free and rising up to the top of the tree with the bats. He’s staring down at himself on the bench, his thin body in a pressed, baby blue button-down shirt, slim chinos and brown dress shoes, and in the gap between his trousers and shoes a flash of colourful socks. He looks so young from up here. So stiff and naive and restrained. Why has he never been in a garden like this before? Why hasn’t he lived a life of chaos and risk and pounding, rushing blood?
He knows why. Choosing chaos and risk is a privilege, and it costs. And where he comes from, there are no extra resources. But tonight, what’s happening right now, is not a choice, nothing he sought out. It’s just happening, and he’s letting it happen.
‘Jacob,’ Yassim begins to speak quietly in his American-accented English. ‘Who are you, Jacob? How do you make the trees bloom in August?’
It should sound cheesy, overly sweet, like something from a B-movie. It should make him giggle, break the spell. But it doesn’t. Quite the opposite. This is a night where magnolia trees bloom in August, and every sentence has been set free from history. Jacob opens his mouth, closes it again. Yassim stares at him calmly, neither restless nor impatient.
‘Or don’t tell me,’ Yassim says. ‘Let me guess.’
Jacob feels himself falling down from the treetops again, landing in his own body, in his own head. He doesn’t feel calmer, not at all, but he does feel braver. Ready to go all the way, no matter where it leads.
‘Okay,’ Jacob says and smiles, he hopes seductively. ‘Tell me who I am, Yassim.’
He scoots closer to his new friend, so close that their shoulders touch, and leans towards him so that their noses almost brush each other. If they are going to kiss, they should do it now. Jacob’s whole body tenses up. How much more obvious can he be? He’s gone further than ever before. He’s going to do it now. Going to kiss Yassim. Let Yassim kiss him and caress him and put his hand under his shirt, unbutton his trousers. He’ll let Yassim lie him flat on this bench, here in the darkness, and do whatever he wants to him. There’s a kind of freedom in yielding.
But Yassim just looks at him with eyes that are half amused or arrogant, half filled with warmth. He doesn’t kiss Jacob, he doesn’t put his hand on his neck or against his chest. Instead, he pulls back and smiles again.
‘You’re a Scandinavian diplomat,’ he says.
Jacob quivers with pride. Yassim may not have kissed him, but he sees Jacob the way he wants to be seen, and it’s such a confirmation.
‘You’re very new,’ he continues. ‘This is your first international posting, and you’re a bit confused. You’re used to being in control. Good at school, best grades all the way through. You probably speak perfect Arabic, but don’t know any slang.’
Yassim’s smile widens, he’s really getting going now.
‘You play squash and tennis and like German white wines, and when you’ve had a couple glasses you let go of that polished surface and dance on the table to ABBA.’
Jacob blushes a little. He doesn’t know if what he feels is pride because Yassim sees him as he wants to be seen, or if he thinks Yassim might be teasing him, thinks he’s a stereotype.
‘What do you think so far?’ Yassim says. ‘Looks to me like you’re blushing, so I can’t be too far off?’
‘Go on,’ Jacob whispers. ‘I want to hear more.’
Yassim nods and moves a little closer, so Jacob has to stop himself from gasping. He wants to close his eyes and open his mouth, pull Yassim close, but he knows that’s not his role. It’s Yassim who decides, that much is clear, and Jacob allows it to be that way.
‘You come from a good family,’ Yassim continues, whispering now, as if he were telling a story, and he is, in a way. ‘A penthouse in Stockholm, perhaps? Your father is a politician, maybe an ambassador? You know which fork to use at the embassy’s dinners, anyway. Your mother has money, maybe an estate in the country. You have a fancy last name, maybe even two.’
Now Jacob is no longer blushing; instead he’s just letting confirmation wash over him. It’s working. This is the first time he’s tested out his persona, and it’s working. Everything he constructed so carefully and planned and studied while he was growing up. Everything he learned to imitate to the most minute detail in order to succeed at escaping, heading for something else, something bigger and better.
At the same time, it feels so insignificant now, completely irrelevant. It feels like he made the wrong bet, as if he’s misunderstood something fundamental. He remembers the picture of that young lawyer in Dagens Nyheter, her obvious determination and conviction. He can feel his blood burning, here in the garden. Can feel chaos and risk trembling around him. Everything he believed about the world. One day in Beirut, one night in a garden, and all the old stuff feels meaningless. For the first time, he wants to tell someone who he really is. And he opens his mouth.
But before he can say anything, Yassim’s face is so close to his that the tips of their noses touch, and Jacob almost laughs from nervousness, but Yassim’s lips are already on his and instead he gasps and forgets everything Yassim said, forgets the garden, forgets his own story, what’s true and what he created.
There’s nothing but this, he thinks. Nothing else matters.
*
It’s not until Yassim pulls back that Jacob opens his eyes and sees how the light in the garden has changed, how everything around him is suddenly sharper. The night will soon be over, the dawn is creeping over the uncut grass, through the wild tangle of the treetops, and climbing up the pink walls of the abandoned palace. Jacob shivers and tries to smile while Yassim caresses his chest, inside his unbuttoned shirt.
‘You’re freezing,’ he says, pulling back his hands, fiddling with the buttons of Jacob’s shirt. ‘I don’t want you to get a cold.’
Jacob leans against him, puts his hand around his shoulder and his head tenderly against his neck just below his jaw. He kisses his skin lightly, nibbles and sucks.
‘So keep me warm,’ he whispers.
He lets his hand slide over Yassim’s T-shirt again, over his hard, flat stomach, down over his hip, towards his groin and cock. He feels Yassim’s breathing quicken and pulls him closer. Feels Yassim press against his hand, put his hand on top of Jacob’s then pull it away, just as he did several times already. But his desire is so fierce now, the chemistry so powerful that he instead pushes Jacob’s hand towards him and rubs himself against it.
‘Let me,’ Jacob whispers. ‘Let me feel you.’
He’s surprised by a kind of happiness. That he got him here, even though Yassim for some reason stopped him whenever he tried to do anything more than kiss or caress him. The power he feels now that Yassim can’t hold back is intoxicating, and Jacob moans deeply into his ear. And for a moment, he thinks Yassim might give in, but it’s as if Yassim steels himself and gains strength as he pushes Jacob’s hand away.
‘Not now,’ he whispers. ‘Not here.’
Frustration and disappointment sting inside Jacob. Well, why not? he wants to scream. We’re alone here, in a garden. You want this too!
But before he can, Yassim quiets him with a kiss.
‘Soon,’ he says. ‘But not now, not tonight.’
He kisses him again and finishes buttoning Jacob’s shirt, then pulls his lips away, scoots back, and stands up.
‘I’m sorry,’ Yassim says. ‘I didn’t mean to get you excited in this way. I didn’t think I’d…’ He falls silent and glances around at the outlines that are getting sharper around them.
‘You’d what?’ Jacob says, frustrated.
Yassim looks at him again, the arrogance almost gone from his eyes now. In its place is just a straightforward warmth. ‘I didn’t think I’d feel like this,’ he says. ‘And I don’t want it to end before it even starts. Do you understand?’
No! Jacob wants to say. I don’t understand anything. You have me here, I’ll do whatever you want. Just don’t stop now!
But instead he nods, unwilling to reveal how horny and confused and desperate he really is. A slight headache has snuck up on him now as his drunkenness and excitement slowly recede.
‘But you could at least sit down again,’ he says quietly. ‘Can’t we talk? I never told you if I’m really the person you described.’
Yassim smiles. ‘Habibi,’ he says. ‘Does it matter who you really are? I want you as you are, right here, right now, this morning. But I don’t have time. I’m already late.’
He glances over at the gate that leads to the street, then throws what looks like a camera bag over his shoulder. Did he have that with him earlier in the night? Jacob doesn’t even remember; he only remembers lips and skin and eyes.
‘Do you have to go now?’ he says. Disappointment clawing inside him.
Yassim just shrugs his shoulders and fishes his phone out of the pocket of his worn jeans. ‘How do I reach you?’ he says. ‘Before we forget.’
Jacob rattles off his Facebook and Instagram, but Yassim just shakes his head. ‘Just a phone number,’ he says. ‘That’s enough.’
Jacob gives him his Swedish number; he doesn’t have a Lebanese SIM card yet.
‘You really are new here,’ Yassim says, taking a step towards him and caressing his cheek. ‘I like it.’
Jacob laughs but feels a stitch of annoyance. He may be new here, but it still hurts that Yassim views him that way, like a novice, naive and fresh.
‘And how can I get a hold of you?’ Jacob says.
Yassim doesn’t answer; he just sits down again, puts his hands on the back of Jacob’s neck, pulls him close and pushes his mouth against his, pushes his tongue into Jacob’s mouth. This kiss is different, not tender and tentative like earlier in the night, but hard and knowing, full of intention and a kind of restrained violence that leaves Jacob breathless. If he ever thought he had any kind of initiative here, that thought vanishes now. The excitement in that insight drives him almost crazy, and he pushes himself against Yassim. But Yassim ends the kiss.
‘You can’t just leave me,’ Jacob whispers. ‘Not after this.’
Yassim stands up again with a slight smile on his lips. ‘I’m sorry,’ he says. ‘But I can’t stay. Believe me, there’s nothing else I’d rather do. But I’m going on a trip, and I’m already late.’
Jacob shakes his head. ‘Now? You’re taking a trip today, this morning?’
Yassim nods. ‘I wasn’t expecting this,’ he says. ‘With you. And I’m late. Very, very late.’
He takes a step over to the sparse grass and slowly backs away through the dawn light, backs towards the gate they entered through, towards the world they came from.
Jacob stands up too. He wants to follow, he wants to say: Wait! I’m coming with you. We can take a taxi, a flight, whatever you want.
But instead, he just asks hollowly: ‘But you’ll call, right?’
Now it’s almost completely light in the garden, and he watches as the sun’s rays make their way over the grass, towards the palace and up above the dark branches of the trees. Yassim smiles at him again and nods calmly. ‘I’ll call,’ he says. ‘When I get back, I promise.’
Jacob wants to believe him, wants to think that what Yassim says is true, that the fairytale of this night was real. At the same time, he can’t help feeling like this is the end. Not every fairytale has a happy ending.