The Last Rectangle Read online

  Floor 3 Left - Taibah

  On the third floor on the left side lived Taibah and her brother Sadek, much younger than her. Taibah’s grandmother was English. Fate trapped her in Lebanon when she was on her way to live in India taking the Lebanese route instead of the usual Suez stop. She married a rough man albeit educated and wealthy. The two fell in love at first sight and out of it soon after. After the birth of Taibah’s mother, their only daughter, divorce proceedings started. In the process of divorcing her husband, she had driven 3 or 4 lawyers to distraction. Finally, they ganged up on her and convinced her to leave for England. Taibah’s mother grew up with her and returned to Lebanon in the early fifties where following the footsteps of her mother, she married another Lebanese, this time educated but neither rough nor wealthy. Gabriel was meek and she was soon bored with him and returned to England leaving Taibah and Sadek with their father in Beirut. There, she married an Englishman and had a son by him who in a most unusual manner was very attached to Taibah and Sadek and often visited and stayed with them in Beirut. Taibah’s father started work in Kuwait and was regarded by all as a shallow person. Even Taibah considered him of the lowest variety. For her mother, she had more respect but little understanding. From her she inherited a sharp sense and ball-crushing mannerisms. She elected to study literature and regarded a career in the theatre as her life. Of course, that meant going back to England, following her mother and grandmother. She had a perfect English accent which turned Lebanese around the edges when she was excitedly arguing a point. She was surrounded by young men who never dared fly too close to the candle flame. Maybe they knew about the two black widow spiders in her past. She, on her part, collected boyfriends, in pairs and triplicates, often simply being satisfied if a relationship “may have amounted to something” for her to be satisfied at having made a conquest. So as she sewed the names of her boyfriends on her mental canvas, she practiced the most unlikely roles, on her own. At night, she would be on the balcony with a book in her hand which took two positions: up when she was reading and down and half closed when she was repeating the role. When she needed space, she would slip into the apartment on the right hand side of the second floor and try out all her parts. This apartment had been lived in by an old couple before but during one of the heavy bouts, a shell went through it and damaged everything. The old couple went up to their village and were never seen again. Soon the flat was cleaned up and in the middle of the whole building, looked like it had been left as is from the time when the building was a simple concrete structure. Taibah regarded this as an open theatre and would run up and down in flowing chiffon reciting her soliloquies. In one mad scene, she used a tray that mechanics use for sliding under cars. She swam up and down the empty flat on the third floor in the final scenes of Ophelia, definitely not her favorite role for she would neither live nor die like Ophelia.

  One time a Polish theatrical group came to Beirut. They played very modern classical music mixed with theatrical performances. In the press conference before the play, they promised to carry out an improvisation on stage and hoped that, on the night, members of the audience may join in the improvisation. This was Taibah’s queue. As soon as the performance started on its way, she went to the back of the theatre, got dressed up in the likeness of an Arab as the west sees him: complete with Kafiyya, Uqal and dark glasses not forgetting the little goatee and slowly walked down from the back towards the stage. As the 3 actors were performing their improvisation, she climbed onto the stage and wove her way around them. Having encouraged such a participation, she could not understand why they remained oblivious of her. Soon, one of the actors brought up two pots, one empty and the other containing water and started pouring water from one pot to the other, slowly raising his arms in the process until the two pots were as far above his head as possible. Taibah was gripped by a sudden fear that the water will come crashing down on her as part of their contribution to her act. She slowly receded and sat under the piano which had been left on stage from the previous performance. When the piece was over, the actors insisted that she take the bow with them. She did. When the crowd moved into the dressing rooms, Taibah disappeared before anyone could talk to her.

  Floor 1 Right - The Lawyer

  Kamil lived on the first floor on the right hand side, the flat that was least hit during the war. In fact, this was not his flat. He was asked to stay in it to protect it from squatters while its real owners, a family of 5, were out of Lebanon. Kamil was working on his law degree while employed as an administrative assistant in an insurance company. That meant coming back home at 6 every day to go through his academic requirements. Law did not suit him but it was a profession that was singled out for him by his family from the very start. He went through it with ease, always regretting this path but not knowing what else he could have done. In time, he graduated and started working in a law office conveniently located within a walking distance from the building. From his little office at the law firm, he could see the back end of the dining room where his papers were strewn. His first case was a murder case. The case was to defend a thug who, under contract, had killed one of two brothers. The brother who was killed had confided to his elder brother the sordid details of the steps leading to his murder but nothing could be done to save him. The two brothers came from a good family, a little conservative and one that had selected two fine sisters as the prospective brides for the two brothers. The engagement period was long enough for the younger brother to fall in love with his chosen bride to be. There was no such love between the older brother and his chosen bride. In due course and due to frequent double dates, the bride of the younger brother turned her attention towards the older brother and promptly fell in love with him. The younger brother went mad with anger, but as it was his own brother, he could not do very much.

  As the lawyer dug into the stories, he went back one generation and realized that the mother of the two ladies had had her own little tragedy. While a young lady, she was in love with two different men in her family, both of them quite eager to marry her. Her love was so undecided that she broke her own heart and married a third gentleman, who was just that. No love was lost between the two and they proceeded to build a family that was based on understanding and respect. Her two daughters grew up in a quiet atmosphere till they met the two brothers. Now with the younger brother in a state of violent turmoil, he turned suicidal. No such attempt was made because he felt too cowardly until he came up with the idea of having someone do it for him. It was during the war and there was no shortage of professional thugs. He knew how to attract them by driving at night in a very expensive car. They flocked around him like flies over a lump of horseshit. Late one night, after the encounter was mistaken for a homosexual pickup, he met his suicider. They quickly agreed on a scenario documented by a written agreement to clear the thug. He would kill the younger brother within one week of the agreement against a mutually accepted set of payments. On returning home that night, the younger brother found his older brother up and very worried about him. Intense pangs of regret surfaced during the talk whereupon he confessed the whole thing to his brother. Both brothers went out through the night looking for the thug trying to reverse the order. Nothing doing. In a few days, the younger brother was found at the bottom of the stairs in the building, shot down with one bullet through the heart. Kamil could not work out whether a written order to the thug would result in his being declared “innocent” or not, but went on working on the case defending him.

  Floor 3 Right - The Professor

  The professor lived in the third floor on the right side. He came from a village in Bekaa he hated so much he never admitted he came from that place. They found his wife on the Corniche pavement, one day, in a deep sleep, or so they thought. When the Police was called, they discovered she was dead. The professor refused to say anything. He put the body in his living room. Only his students and his research assistants came, one of whom stayed by his side, taking care of most of the proceed
ings.

  He taught at AUB in the Department of English Literature and that was the only job he had held since getting his PhD from Maryland. In spite of his specialization, he had the distinction of being the only professor to teach in both the English and Arabic departments. Around him were two breeds: those that came to literature because of their fascination with it and those that were masters of the language and thought that a love for literature followed that skill. He was different, if at least for recognizing the two breeds. Literature grew on him like the ivy on the university buildings, healthy, wayward and unkempt. For someone who knew the mass of literature that intimately, he hated a large part of it. It was a family he could well do without. He slowly shed his love for literature the same way he shed his love for his family during the frequent Sundays in the village when he was little. While very young, all one had to do to gain his love was to talk to his parents. With time and in his mind, the family grew. Each Sunday as the family got together, he watched them pluck the feathers of distant relatives, then distant friends and soon, not so distant cousins and uncles. The family grew smaller and so did literature.

  Reading a poem or a short story eventually left a bad taste in his mouth. Each new work added its own tensions. He was indebted to it. Those he cracked, he despised. Those he didn’t stayed with him. More got cracked than stayed. He never really wanted to write. He could not bear to teach. He wished that literature would go away as he slipped into its quick sand. But it never went. It turned him around so he turned it around. His became a war against literature and all it entailed. He would buy a gallon of sweet wine from some monastery, take out his students in several fishing boats into the open sea, all expecting an epiphany, read an irrelevant clip from a newspaper as he poured his libation to the amazement of the students and the fish.

  One day, a discussion centered on the ages of woman. He motioned by a slightly raised finger that he had something to say and when all was quiet, he said that woman was best at the age of 36. Why, someone said? I’ve read books the answer came back. He put on a naughty smirk and bent his head a little which assured him that all had understood his meaning. He then paused and said, would you have understood me if you’d read my response on paper? He had the knack of killing the best poems by reading them out aloud over dinner in a mocking tone, repeating the deepest lines in a gurgling voice and inserting odd words from different languages. Parties found him at his best and worst. Those he offended could sometimes put up with him only because his biting sarcasm had wit and intelligence. It was like sucking on lemon and salt. Often, people would invite him because of that only to find that he would spend the evening drinking and harassing young ladies. Literature was driving him and he resented that. Often, his battles against it would result in abstruse games he would invent and impose on his friends. He would corner them with lists of titles of Ph.D. theses or articles in learned magazines: “The Ship or the Building in Fiction as False Microcosm”, “Contrast as a Blending Tool in Eliot”, “Dualism as false Monism”, “Prefixes in Period Names”, “Is the post in postmodern a prefix of modern or is the modern a suffix of post?” One evening, he got everyone to play a game called Hegel. It consisted of selecting someone present, say Kamel. The game would start by calling Kamel the “Thesis”. Someone should then name the guest that best suited Kamel’s “Antithesis”, say it was Walid. Then all together would search for the “Synthesis” and would chant out the name of another poor guest who never understood why. After 5 tries, 2 women broke down in tears, one husband walked out and a young student poured her drink all over the professor. It made his night.

  Trains

  When a train is mentioned in a story you are reading, be careful not to fall into the trap of literary devices. You’ll be tempted to think of the train as a symbol of passage going from one place to the other and passages have rites and rites lead to mythologies. Other devices will make you believe that because a train is between a start and a destination, it is in a state of nothingness, a state that is pure and clear and ready for the germination of new things. Worse still, you may be encouraged into seeing the train as a double image, phallic on the outside and womb on the inside. Watch out for the trick that makes of a train carrying a limited number of passengers a social microcosm. Very often, the click in the sound of the wheels running over the gaps between consecutive rails will be sold to you as an image of time and not as a sound. Clickety clack, clickety clack, if you go you won’t come back. One time, I read a story where the train was completely stripped down of any literary device so that it streamed through the landscape without any references allowing you to give it any meaning you wished. This reversal effect was nothing but a literary device. At other times, songs will remind you of the yearning for freedom felt by prisoners who hear the whistle of trains from their prison cells. It is these same trains that are the cause of melancholy in songs by singers who lament the loss of their freedom by riding trains aimlessly from one station to another. Of course, trains going into dark tunnels should be understood for what they are, very often to allow things to go on that you should not see. Often, the train itself is downgraded to being just a prop, as a physical and not literary device, a place where protagonists meet or where they hide or the trains could be the means of escape from a not so distant past or can be used as fatal instruments about to run down a car that is important in the story or even, in an extreme case, the instrument that contributes to the suicide of the heroine. When an event is awaited, tension is drummed into the story by a ticking bomb on a train or a cracked bridge that the train is approaching. And what about the archeology of trains? It takes one look at a train in a film for you to establish the era of the coming scene. If trains are not linked to time, they are often linked to space where battles or long drawn out fights might take place on or over a train. And how many romances start on a train because it is the only place that divorces the past of the characters from their encounter, now. Well, we’ve reached the station, I better get off.

  Things I Have Stolen

  1.

  Things I have stolen come back to haunt me. A Tyrolean pipe, yellow A4 paper, I cannot remember, a map section torn out of a book in my uncle’s attic. Elements of a world upon world. They haunt me like the little Tyrolean pipe, a book on Beethoven’s quartets. They stand apart from the things I thought I owned, remnant of years of collecting, paring and inventorying, marking crosses in a space whose elements are shared. And in between, a little pipe, yellow A4 paper and my uncle’s book.

  2.

  Today my father’s diary lies open. Day by day he watches my growth as a child. Day by day and by the hour, this insect develops humor, motor control. Patiently he takes note of what I am or was. This is his memory and we tackle to own it. Can I steal it? He with his happiness and me, with the self righteousness of a beggar clutching at crumbs hardly tossed my way. Does it pain you when someone you hardly know describes you to someone you hardly know upon which emerges someone you hardly know? In how many diaries do you reside an incomplete red thought stolen and irretrievable?

  3.

  This morning, I woke up with a halted voice, a dream stayed with me under my hair. I had seen myself for 3 long seconds as a child and woke up feeling a gray surge of affection not for a stolen childhood nor for a surrogate son, nor for a displaced self love but for that child who was all I was and all I am. I ran and played with him, 45 years his senior and as many away from him, Akamaka.