For a week now, that man has been sitting on the cement block facing my building. I don’t know what winds blew him our way – a strange man. But who would dare ask these days? Who would query someone at the corner of a street in Beirut? Or in a bomb shelter? Or a hideout? Who would dare question anyone, whether man, woman or child? In Beirut these days no one would ask questions like ‘Who are you? Where have you come from? Why are you here?’ It would be like striking a match to the fuse of a bomb.
He has been sitting in that same place for a week now, immobile, not eating or drinking, nor even moving to answer the call of nature … Or at least that is how it seems to me. I see him every time I walk in or out of my house – there he is.
How can I avoid looking at him? He is sitting there, facing the entrance. Not crouching in a corner, not blending into a wall, not squatting behind the trunk of what used to be a tree. Just sitting. Simply sitting on that concrete block – half a metal barrel, actually, filled with cement, used as a shield by a fighter at some point during the war. (Don’t ask who poured the cement into the barrel, or when or for what purpose, for that is another long story – a nine-year-old story and growing older, its action taking place in this neighbourhood and that and the other …) In any case, that is what he is sitting on, a makeshift stool he has turned into his makeshift headquarters, from which he darts his nervous glances. This man seems to be living on the cement barrel. And I cannot avoid looking at him as I come and go. He’s sitting in that strategic spot and watching me. Every time I open my door I see him watching me: every time I step out of the building, he’s watching, or so I think, for I have not had the courage to make a move towards him, maybe get closer to him, introduce myself to him get to know him … I wouldn’t dare.
‘Get to know him? Whatever for?’ I ask myself as I slam the car door and take off as far away as possible from his piercing gaze.
Actually, that, I think, is what bothers me most about the man – his eyes. They are constantly searching, constantly roaming in all directions, in the direction of every noise or movement. His eyes seem to be bolting out of their sockets. And like a pair of nervous birds, they fly this way and that, dart up electric poles and down again, throw themselves against concrete walls in a bid to go through them. Then, realising the impossibility of the task, they return to their place, only to try once more.
Yes it’s his eyes that bother me. They are searching for the unknown, the unattainable. Always looking, seeking, searching. I question his motives, and my doubts grow. Why has he chosen to take refuge in this place? Surely if he’s lost something, is looking for someone, it would do him good to conduct his search walking around the city streets rather than … Why here? Why does he not move from that spot?
Why? A huge ‘why?’ An enormous question mark. It escapes me and hangs in the air and becomes part of the echoes around me. It obsesses me.
I could save myself this worry and gnawing curiosity and ask an alert neighbour – the one who lives at the intersection of other people’s lives, recording every movement of their traffic. Or I could ask the building janitor.
Yes! Great idea! And so simple – why hadn’t I thought of it before?
Naturally, he answers my ‘why’ with a smile that says he ‘has it all under control’.
‘Who? That man? He’s one of the refugees, the displaced.’
He waits for me to ask him the very obvious next question, ‘Where from? What part of the country has he run away from?’
He opens his book of war days, in which he’s written newspaper headlines and news reports and radio broadcasts and analyses and rumours and stories that float in the air. ‘What does it matter?’ he says finally. ‘He’s a refugee and a stranger to this neighbourhood.’
‘Have you spoken to him?’
‘Yeah, the first day. He’s from one of the really hard-hit areas. His people have taken refuge in the building facing ours – you know that, of course. There are twenty families. They’ve taken over all the empty apartments whose owners are in Europe.’ Sarcasm tinges his words.
He stops there to see whether I am satisfied with the information he has provided. Then he looks at me, a pregnant, knowing look and the same confident, all-knowing smile of a simple man that says, ‘It’s under control, I’ve got it all under control.’
‘Blessed are the simple people,’ I think to myself. ‘Blessed are their simple, uncomplicated hearts … It is not easy in these times to be so simple-minded. Oh, how very difficult it is!’
‘So, madam …’ he continues when he realises that I am not going to ask any more questions. He continues because the story has been knocking on the walls of his conscience. It pushes him to tell it. ‘The man has a story, madam. No, a tragedy is what it is.’
I object to hearing this. Immediately I stop him. ‘He must have relatives or a family.’
‘Yeah, sure he does. They took the second floor in the building. But he refused to go up there, to stay there. The family is made up of …’
I interrupt him again: ‘It may be the shock of having to move. He’ll soon get used to it and start leading a normal life …’ I move, I shuffle. I want to run away. I have no desire to hear what happened to the family, how many they are, how they live. I certainly don’t want to hear the details of the tragedy that has befallen them. It has befallen the entire country. It has engulfed us all … What good will the details do me? No, I certainly do not want to hear this story. ‘Do you hear me, man? What good are details once the whole is lost?’
‘Ah, but some details are important. Some details carry within them the essence of the whole.’ My simple building janitor waxes philosophical, the words gushing out of him. He no longer awaits my questions or comments.
The door is half open and I try to leave, but he stands in front of it and points to the man sitting on his barrel, his voice an odd mixture of pity and mockery. ‘This man has lost his mind,’ he says. ‘And who would blame him, really. Man is not made of stone, you know. Some tragedies are just too big. More powerful than he is. They destroy him.’
Again I try to get away from the circle his words have drawn around me. But the door is half closed in front of me and the janitor has saddled his story and is preparing to take off on it.
‘He keeps saying, “He’ll be back.” Do you know the story of the Green Bird? It’s an old story. One of our forgotten legends told in the villages. “I am the Green Bird. I walk with a swagger.” This is how it begins. You know it, the mother revives her son from the dead, rejuvenates his dried bones…’
He quotes again, ‘My dear Mother/picks up my bones/places them in the marble urn …’ Do you remember? The other woman, the stepmother, had conspired against the beautiful young boy and killed him, and made his body a feast for her friends. But his dead mother’s soul revived him. It gathered his bones into a marble urn and nurtured them with drops of water until they came alive again! But her young son could not return as human flesh. He turned into a green bird and started haunting the other woman in dreams and wakefulness, hovering over her, plucking at her, reminding her of her crime and that Judgment Day was near.
This man here, he awaits the return of the green bird. He says he’s afraid to close his eyes lest the green bird returns and he does not see it. He stays up all night, his eyes roaming all over the place. He’s afraid to close his eyes and not see the green bird when he comes.’
‘Who is this green bird he talks about, anyway?’ I hear myself asking the janitor, almost against my will. The story has conspired against me, and it hooks me, and I cannot free myself. ‘What is the green bird to this man?’ I ask again.
My storyteller smiles, an almost mocking, nearly sad, slightly humorous kind of smile, and I think, ‘What is there to smile about? Didn’t he say the story was tragic? Yes, but isn’t there a saying that goes, the most tragic events are those that induce laughter?’
‘It’s his son, madam. His eldest son, his only son among five girls. He brought him up, educated him and put him through university and pinned all his hopes upon him. He sold everything he owned to put him through medical school. Yeah, he’s a poor man, but he managed to put his bright son through university to become a doctor. Being bright, at least, is not the privilege of the upper classes alone, you know. God gave him a bright young boy, and through His divine guidance, the man educated the boy. He would have graduated from medical school at the end of the year. Then he would have been able to carry some of his father’s burden. Maybe even put his sisters through school … Who knows, one of them may even have been able to go to university herself. Who knows what the future would have held for the young man before the …’
‘Before what?’
I scream the question at him but he continues, calm, unperturbed. ‘Yes, madam … Before that shell found him and … he exploded.’
The janitor shifts from philosophy to literature and waxes poetic. He draws the clearest of pictures for me and slaps me with it, using that one expression ‘he exploded’, with all its literal connotations. I have certainly never heard it before – war slang, no doubt. And as he continues speaking, frame by frame the scene he describes plays out behind my eyes, and I am transported to a different time and place. The scene unfolds before me, running alternately in fast and slow motion, very slow motion.
‘The shell surprised him as he was coming out of the bomb shelter. He had wanted to take advantage of the calm. He thought it was a truce or a ceasefire. He told his mother: ‘I’ll just go out for a minute and move the car to where it’ll be safer.’ That’s when it surprised him. First one shell then the other … They slammed him against the wall … That’s how they found him. His mother, his father, his sisters … that’s how they found him. Splattered across a wall in a hail of shrapnel and rockets and shells. It was raining bullets as the father gathered his sons’ remains into his bosom.
One entire night the man sat in that pool of blood, his son’s remains in his arms. One whole night. Then in the morning they had to pry what was left of the body from his arms in order to prepare it for burial. They had to pry it by force from his arms!
He spent the entire night talking to his son, soothing him. “You are cold. The night is cold and dark. Listen to the thunder and the rain. My child is so cold. Leave him, leave him in my arms. I am keeping him warm.” The neighbours had to all work together to pry it away from him. Like prying open a clam shell to remove the precious pearl in order to bury it in the earth.
Here he is now. He’s lost his home and shelter and left the last of his rational mind in that pool of blood. If you go near him he’ll ask you, like he asks everyone else, “Have you seen him?” And you would say, “Who?” And he’ll tell you, “The green bird, of course, who else? He’s coming, don’t you know. Come sit next to me. He’ll be here any minute now.”
He says that, and he doesn’t care who you are or what your reaction will be to what he’s saying. He may think you’re his wife or one of his daughters. He may think you’re there to wait, like he is. And he will just repeat those words to anyone who crosses his path. He’ll ask them if they’ve seen it … ask them to sit quietly by him and wait… ask them to listen as he does, keeping his eyes open all the while … darting from one corner to the next … waiting … for the beloved green bird.’
Translated by Thuraya Khalil-Khoury