I, The Divine

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What I recall from all the craziness of that day is the sound of the opening stanza of Deep Purple’s “Smoke on the Water” being massacred by Mazen, the boy living on the second floor. Funny what we remember. Setting my memory in time is easy. The first day of the war in Beirut, April 1975. I was fifteen. Shells and bombs fell all around us, but we must have had electricity since Mazen was playing his new electric guitar, had been for the last ten days since he had gotten it for his birthday, and no “political skirmish” was going to get him to stop. I distinctly remember wondering how he could play so badly. Every boy in Beirut played “Smoke on the Water” on his electric guitar, yet we had the misfortune to live above the one boy who was tone-deaf. He took his guitar out to the stairwell, while his parents desperately tried to shut him up. The giddy days.

My whole family was out of our apartment. The stairwell seemed the safest place, surrounded as it was on every side. My father sat sideways, with his back facing the wall, one knee close to his chest, crumpling his best brown suit. He looked so handsome in those days. His hair was still dark brown, his fierce eyes still indomitable. He smoked his cigarette, blowing smoke toward the upper floors. He spoke softly to us throughout, to keep us calm. “They can’t keep going on like this,” he said. “They’ll stop soon.” I noticed skin between his socks and the hem of his pants. His sock garters must have been loose. It was the first time I saw a flaw in his attire. My father’s name is Mustapha Hammoud Nour el-Din, M.D. Everyone called him Doctor, even his children sometimes. I called him Docteur Baba.

I smelled something peculiar in the air, what I discovered later to be cordite. The things we learn. In time, the smell of cordite, of garbage, urine, and decaying flesh, would become familiar to us, banal and clichéd.

Three loud explosions in a row rocked the building. Too close. Pallid-faced Ramzi, the youngest, screamed and burrowed deeper into his mother’s dress. My father winced. I assumed he was wondering if Ramzi was too young to be chided. Boys should never scream.

“They don’t seem to be letting up,” my stepmother, Saniya, said. She held her son close, caressing his hair. “Maybe we should move down and be with the neighbors.” She was rounded and soft, bearing an uncanny resemblance to Anna Magnani. She sat between her two daughters, Majida on her right, and Rana on her left, comforting them. She would look at us, her three stepdaughters, intermittently, wondering how she should comfort us. All three of us remained separate from her and the young ones.

Amal, my eldest sister, then nineteen, was about to get married. Gunfire could not dampen her mood. She leaned against the wall, resolute, wearing Jordache jeans and a lavender angora V-neck sweater, her face serene.

My other sister, Lamia, seemed unperturbed as well, but in a different mood. No amount of gunfire could transform the air of gloom around her. She sat, head bowed, not participating. She was almost eighteen. The dim light created shadowy havoc on her acne-scarred face. Her morose expression was only habit, through continual recurrence of an emotional display, the face reverted to it, habituated itself to it, even in repose. She did not seem to belong to our family, yet was an essential part of it.

I stared up at the water stains on the ceiling, at the peeling paint. I wondered whether the concierge would paint the stairwell if the building was damaged enough. Another shell fell close by.

“I’m sure it’ll be over soon,” I said. “They’ll get tired.” I smoothed my red dress. My hand curled a lock of my reddish brown hair.

My half-sister Rana wrote furiously in her diary. She wrote incessantly, considering the world nothing but material for her writing. My favorite sister was growing up to be a stunner, a heartbreaker in training.

“What are you writing?” I asked.

“I’m writing about this. Everything that’s happening. All the noise. Where it comes from, how unexpected. Why the stop, start, stop and start again. All the different sounds. Always coming from different places. I can’t tell where it’s coming from next.”

“No one can tell, my dear,” said Saniya. “No one’s sure who’s fighting whom. We just have to wait it out.”

“If I knew what to expect, it would be better,” Rana said. “I just don’t know what’s coming next.”

Something exploded not too far from us, making everyone jump. Ramzi screamed again. Rana reached out and patted his head. She seemed so adult. He began whimpering. I knelt down on the stairs below him and rubbed his tiny back. “It’s okay, hayatee. Everything will be okay. I promise.”

As if at my signal, the gunfire stopped. We heard men shouting, but we could not discern what was being said. “They seem to be on the roof of the building next door,” my father said. “That’s probably why the shells are dropping close.”

“Do you think they’ll go away?” Saniya asked.

“I hope so. Maybe I should go up and talk to them.”

“No. We don’t even know who they are. You can’t talk to them.”

“Maybe one of them is hurt,” Rana said. “Would they need our help?”

We sat silent, wondering if they would fight again. Whenever someone tried to say something, my father shushed them. After ten minutes of silence, the electric guitar was back at it again. Lamia stood up, leaned across the railing, and screamed down, “Stop making all that noise. We’re trying to think here.” She sat back down.