Beirut Hellfire Society by Rawi Hage

Author:Rawi Hage
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2019-05-02T16:00:00+00:00

MADAME AND MONSIEUR FIORA

Pavlov mostly kept to his bed for the next three days. He read. He left the house only to go to the grocery store for batteries for the flashlight, a few candles, cigarettes and ice. At night, the electricity went down. On the third morning, early, he was awakened by gun battles and bombs falling. Sirens and speeding cars came and went through the neighbourhood. He didn’t need to listen to the news—war and its constant mayhem inevitably ended up parading itself beneath his window. Tales of combat deaths, sniper deaths, deaths by misadventure, old age, accidents, car crashes, massacres, drowning, collapsing houses, stillbirth, hunger and gluttony, execution, slaughter—all converged under his balcony.

The fourth day after his meeting with Souad, Pavlov ventured out to buy bread. He overheard the grocer talking about the death of a neighbour, Madame Fiora. She had been shot by her husband, the grocer said, but even though she was the victim of this crime, the Church refused to bury her in the cemetery—because a Communist, an atheist such as her, he said, deserves only to be buried in hell.

Madame Fiora had been a tall Spaniard with broad shoulders, long gypsy-black hair, and wide eyes like those of an Arab, whose seductiveness she accentuated by lining the edges with thick black kohl. Two hand-drawn black lines substituted for her plucked eyebrows and formed permanent swords below her spacious forehead and above those big eyes. A grand madame with imposing breasts and strong shoulders, she had used the magnitude of her body to make her way among the diminutive local men. She wore thick high heels, which made her taller than anyone in the neighbourhood, man or woman. Her deep voice was vocal against all injustices, from the piling of garbage on the sidewalks to the whistles of men as young women passed by. She was a kind of Jeanne d’Arc, with enough broken Arabic to intimidate a nation of mustachioed men.

Her husband, Monsieur Fiora—as everyone called him in deference to his wife—was a small man, bald, who wore bureaucrat’s glasses and a humble, defeated demeanour. He always carried a brown, soft leather briefcase. He hurried home each afternoon with an air of anxiety, but walked to work each morning with an air of relief, as if in respite from the antagonistic climate of his home. An accountant who had studied under French missionaries, he was meticulous, principled and studious, and took pride in his conventionality, honesty and obedience to institutions, secular or religious. On Sundays, he greeted everyone in his most proper manner, with a French Catholic Bon dimanche! He never left home without his tie or his well-polished shoes, and during the mild winter he could not be parted from his silk scarf, leather gloves and one-hundred-percent lambswool hat.

Lately, he had been seen with bruises on his face and a black eye, which he blamed on the unsafe sidewalks, on the startling effects of the falling bombs, which caused him to lose

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