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By Sahar Mandour

In this finely observed novel, five young Lebanese women navigate their professional and social lives in a city interrupted by random explosions. It is not a war zone, but there is no peace either; Beirut stands at the edge of both. These women, much like their country, have been shaped by the events of a long civil war, their childhood spent in shelters, their adolescence in an unrecognizable city under rapid reconstruction. And here they are now, negotiating the details of their adult lives, fighting to protect their identities, voices, and relationships in a society constantly under questioning.

Talk of politics and gossip by the young and old animate the coffee shops. Heated debates and power dynamics unfold in bars and on the streets. Mandour’s funny and defiant style invites an intimacy, giving readers a glimpse into the absurdities and injustices of everyday life in Lebanon. With empathy and a deep honesty, Mandour narrates the lives of these women who struggle to create their own destiny while at the same time coming to terms with the identity of their Mediterranean city.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Syracuse University Press
• Release date: Mar 1, 2016
• ISBN: 9780815653707

Book preview

Knock knock knock. . . . Ring ring ring.

Door knocking. Bell ringing.

Am I dreaming or is someone at the door? I want to sleep! I’m a guest here; I shouldn’t have to open the door. There’s no one there anyway.

Knock knock knock. . . . Ring ring ring.

What time is it? What’s going on? An attack?

Oh. It’s Komodo.

And as soon as I stop asking questions, my phone starts ringing. Door, doorbell, phone. . . . The sky is falling on my head, and my head is trying to shield my body with a last desperate command: Sleep, ignore it, sleep!

I get up, not because I don’t want her to wait any longer but because I want to put an end to this nerve-racking beginning to a sunny day off that comes once a week only.

I open the door to find no one there. I glance at the elevator—it’s going down.

I rush barefoot to the balcony.

With my head poking out of the bedspread of green plants, I wait for her to walk out of the building. I stand there like a wild rose, eyes half-closed, old prescription glasses weighing my eyelids down even more, hair pointing in all directions, and wearing a slightly-too-loud pink top inappropriate for balcony appearances.

No one exits the building, well, at least not Koko (short for Komodo, my pet name for her when I’m feeling friendly).

I go to my cell phone that is almost out of minutes—a result of laziness, not poverty. I find a missed call from Koko that didn’t wake me. There’s a text message from Mona too: I’m up and ready for our day off, let’s have some fun! I get exhausted just reading her text with all its energy and enthusiasm. I’m still dead; I’ll text her back later.

The phone rings again in my hand. Komodo. I hang up and run through the door to the balcony overlooking the silent Ras Beirut. The problem with silence is that the laugh of a baby can destroy it. In the silence, loud sounds become jarring, targeting the ear and violating it, affecting a person’s mood directly. They travel through the veins and make people lose their temper. Just like the beeping sound in someone’s ear after an explosion—if, that is, before that explosion, the ear had been enjoying the silence. And in this country, life is trying to accustom people to absorbing the highest amount of beeps possible; and to do so with patience. Because people don’t like to wait even if the wait is justified, like if an old woman is getting out of a car, or if a bewildered, sweaty man’s car has broken down because of the heat. Even the sun is more compassionate than the shouting of why can’t you discipline that car of yours! and the honks that make a person jump out of his own skin. They’re not patient. And they’re free not to be. They all are free. Free to scream, and fight at a party. Free to curse, harass, and drive people out of their environment either with violence or with the smell of cigars. They’re all free.

There’s no Koko at my doorstep, and no Koko at the front gate of my building. Where’s Koko?

I dial her number on my beautiful yet empty cell phone. I’m seething because I’m using up my emergency minute. I’ve saved it in case I needed to call a friend to rescue me in a moment of semi-consciousness after an armed gang has driven by me, cursed me for something they think I stand for, and shot me. (No, I decide this daydream won’t kill me, nor will I be permanently injured, or permanently dispossessed. I will emerge from my short coma—a coma to make the audience fear for my life and the media take my assassination attempt seriously. But it will be short so people won’t get bored and give up on me. Only my parents and loved ones will wait for me, but waiting would be more tolerable if the world were sharing it with them. And they won’t be too worried because the doctors will tell them that my prognosis is very good. I will awake from my coma in a moment of media climax and will announce that I’ve become more mature after the assault and pain I endured. I will remain calm and won’t curse anyone or shout at the camera. No, never. I will ask the camera to be calm, and I will ask it to be patient. We all are, after all, against this fitnah, and I will refuse to be considered any better than the others who are also against the fitnah.)

I dial Koko’s number. She picks up yelling, unleashing a store of Arabic vocabulary, like a Bekaa wedding conquering my eardrum. Koko! Lower your voice, please, I’ll let you in, come up, but for heaven’s sake, shut up!

Her Sri Lankan voice is loud—I have to talk to her about that. My friend Zumurrud is always telling me to lower my voice. She’s a believer in low volume. Sensitive, light as a feather, classy, civilized. When she tells me to lower my voice, my happiness in telling a story snuffs out. Her sudden comment smothers it. Like a hand placing a cup over my candle. My flame flickers and I fade. I get ashamed of my enthusiasm because it’s loud, or maybe it’s my enthusiasm that becomes ashamed of me because I haven’t stood up for it, so it abandons me. Then my story flickers and drools off the side of my tongue, and I turn into a rabid dog, fuzzy-eyed and overly emotional, hugging myself on the floor in a corner, howling with a broken voice: Ouuuuuuuuu. I’m sensitive, by the way.

So Koko comes into the room talking in her loud voice. For God’s sake, lower your voice! She laughs in my face. No flickering like a candle? No ouuuuuuu? Not her, she laughs and says in her Arabic that would be perfect if it weren’t for that accent that unites Sri Lankans in Lebanon: You donkey!

I shut up. She keeps laughing. I get angry. She finds it hilarious. I run through the door of the house where we are still standing, into the living room and sit down. She follows me, silent this time.

She sits quietly next to me for barely a few seconds before she picks up the conversation in the lowest tone of voice she can muster. What a low morning voice is to me is a whisper to her. So, out of consideration for my feelings, she whispers. She continues with her story of her brother the beast—her word, not mine—whom she used to love very much until he succumbed to his wife’s nagging and threw their mother out of the house Koko had bought her in Sri Lanka with the money she earned slaving away in Lebanon for ten years. Why did he take the house? Because it was rightfully his as the only male heir after his father’s death. But the house wasn’t given to him. Since Koko had paid for it, she’s the one who chooses who gets the house.

He stirred up a lot of trouble before taking the house by force and leaving his mother on the street. His actions tore the family apart, and Koko was torn in Lebanon too and had to borrow a thousand dollars: five hundred to build a new house and another five to raise its ceiling. And that wasn’t the end of the expenses. She kept sending hundreds and hundreds of dollars until, before she knew it, her debt had doubled. And by the way, that brother of hers owns a house of his own. Years ago, Koko had given him the money for it. He really is a donkey. Koko adds, His wife is fat cow. A vermin. Shame on her! Money not everything!

Today, she tells me of a new development to her story; it seems that her brother has gone crazy.

How, Koko?

Crazy, crazy, he crazy now, insane! No brain, brain gone, flew away, bye.

Okay Koko, but repeating the word and giving me its synonyms don’t really add any information to the story. Why do you think your brother has gone crazy?

Because he crazy! No brain, brain gone means it no work, and he cut down all them flowers, all of them, enormous flowers. I planted them myself when Prasanna was coming to the house to propose to me. Yeah, enormous, very pretty. All gone now, he cut them down, the crazy donkey!

It appears that his (evil) wife went to his mother (Koko’s mother) and begged her to move back in with them, to the house they kicked her out of. But Koko told her mother, all the way from Beirut, not to move back in with them. She has a new house now, and besides, that old house is jinxed. Her brother must have gotten depressed after that, and people thought he’d gone crazy, because shame on him for what he did, there is a God after all! Really, there is a God. (She says that matter-of-factly rather than contemplatively.) Plus, how can he sleep in peace? Of course he going to go crazy. There’s nobody in the neighborhood—we all jammed in there together you know—nobody talk to him no more. The man who works at the grocery store next to our house is like a brother to me and more, he watch out for Mom when I’m away. He told my brother: ‘Don’t come here no more. Shame on you. The house is for the two girls’ (Koko explains: he meant me and my sister). I’m the one who paid for the house! Yeah, he told him that if he goes to his store he breaks both his legs! Yeah! Because he did wrong, nobody talking to him now. (She gets worked up and raises her voice, abandoning her commitment to her morning whispering, but I don’t interrupt her). It’s all his wife’s doing! My brother was good man, and I loved him a lot and he loved me. This is all because of his wife, the cow! She teach at the university you know. (I get shocked by what she says, and check to see if I heard correctly. She pauses for a dramatic effect, then repeats what she said.) Yes, yes, yes! A university professor, so not an idiot! A lot of learning in her! (As in, she’s very educated.) But she greedy, shame on her; it’s not right what she did!

Then, all of a sudden, she looks at me as if she were seeing me for the first time, and scoffs: Look at you! Go take a shower!

Given the state of my appearance, I let her boss me around this time and don’t fire off a comeback. All right, I’ll shower, miss know-it-all, maybe the water will wash off me the dust of the night before.

I stand naked in the bathtub and let the affectionate drops of water fall on me.

I feel safe under the water. Alone here, the drops create all my sounds and bounds and thoughts. I close my eyes, silently surrendering to the internal universe that inhabits every person, including me. Here, my internal world can safely come out. And I can settle its unresolved problems. They slip down my skin. Their traces wash