Beirut Noir by Iman Humaydan

Author:Iman Humaydan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ebook, book
Publisher: Akashic Books
Published: 2015-10-26T16:00:00+00:00

4.

After our departure from the building, a rumor started that the police hadn’t come because of the noise of the stars crashing into each other. But rather because of the colonel who lived in the building across the street. People used to hate him and the police who gathered by his house. He was always grouchy. But I doubted this rumor. I’d never seen the colonel harm anyone and I used to sometimes defend him to Nazmi on the roof. I would say, “He probably saw something bad today and he’s grouchy because he’s sad.”

I defended him even though I didn’t need to, and Nazmi would interrupt me, saying, “Why don’t we start throwing boxes?”

Perhaps I said that because I thought I loved his daughter Dalia and thought she’d love me when she grew up. In the morning I would stand behind the window, holding a big mug of hot milk. But I wouldn’t start drinking from it until I saw her come and stand in the window of her own house, across from me. She wasn’t standing behind the window for my sake. But to watch the street, the cars, and the military jeeps waiting for her father down below. She used to watch every idea, person, and cat on the incline except me. Like me, she carried a mug that I always convinced myself also had milk in it. Perhaps this mug had special maramiya herbal tea to treat diarrhea or mint tea to stop her vomiting or some other drink to improve her breath. But I always believed that there was milk in her mug. On the days when Dalia didn’t stand behind the window, I poured my milk out into the potted plants. Their lactose increased daily until they’d become so much lighter you could no longer say that they were green.

I imagined that Dalia lived in a palace. A palace squeezed onto the first floor of the building across the street. Our house was also on the first floor but she never once looked in my direction. In the beginning I thought it was because of the wide street separating our two buildings. I said surely our house is very, very far from the building across the street. I concluded from this that Dalia was younger than me, much younger. That the people, like me, who can cross the street from our building to the one facing it easily take giant footsteps. If you didn’t take giant footsteps you couldn’t see faraway places, like Dalia’s house. Dalia couldn’t see me because of her tiny footsteps and her youth. In order for me to help her realize that she lived near us, in our space with us, the children older than her, I wanted to rename Caracas Hill the Colonel’s Hill.

I asked Nazmi to promote the new name. But he was afraid and warned me, “Perhaps the colonel will get angry, shoot the wooden boxes, and knock them down from above.” Later I learned that Dalia had been sent abroad to a a faraway country with a forest to receive some kind of treatment.

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