The steps are dark grey slate and the landing lights do not last the length of time it takes to get to the next floor down or up. In the half-light of the stairwell I can’t see the next step. I take the lift.
In our building two floors are given over to business. It’s very quiet. The concierge lives on the ground floor and there are two studios and us and a top floor flat, where a lady and two children live. Or so we thought.
Sometimes the electricity goes off, once or twice a day, but never for longer than a few moments. Internet is slow but it works and we do not feel disconnected even though I am beginning to think that Beirut is all about disconnection.
Today R has just been to a Hezbollah rally where the men and women march on separate sides of the carriageway in South Beirut, the young girls with yellow bands tied around their hijabs. The chorus chant goes ‘Death to Israel! Death to Amerika! Mout al Isreali!, Mout al Amerikiye!’
On the TV the protesters are quiet, sober, and attentive to their leader who seems as emphatic as Trump and does a similar reinforcement gesture with his right hand. His beard is grey and shorn a bit like those coconut hair sculptures you sometimes see in junk shops and he has a black roofless turban that one day will be deemed worthy of hipster imitation.
Apart from the stark chant there seems nothing disorderly or violent about the rally. The leader is the only one venting his scripted ire at the US Embassy plans for Jerusalem, and the recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. There are lots of Palestinian flags and I suppose that the crowd will have lots of Palestinian refugee camp people in it.
Back in Ashrafiyeh all is calm today. We could be in a leafy suburb of Paris except perhaps for the extravagant and exhuberant Christmas lights and the fact that most shops have little Nazarine crèches, all of which is a touch outré for Paris. In this part of Beirut the buildings that have gunshot holes in them have been made into cultural centres and sophisticated cafés, lit in yellow lights in the warm evenings, dreamlike and nostalgic for a war where surely no-one can have been a hero.
On Saturday we thought we’d walk to Badaro to the Christmas market, which turned out to be a type of country fête only all on one street rather than on a village green. We set off late because the water had been turned off. The plumbers on the floor above said ‘Five minutes’ which it turned out was a Lebanese five minutes, so we left without showering or washing up and spent a lazy afternoon drinking mimosas and trying to convince a friend to adopt a cat from a pet shop despite her clear allergy to cats.
When we came back home about five the water was still off and the plumbers said ‘Five minutes!’ and we figured the water would come back on when they went home. R went straight out again to talk Jerusalem with another journalist and I watched a series of Amish movies on the Hallmark YouTube channel.
R re-appeared around 10.30 by which time I had decided that no amount of barn building and button-free clothing could make Amish life seem interesting. The water was still not on so R went to ask the concierge lady about it.
A few minutes later he came back and said the concierge lady seemed scared and had said he had to ask Mr N. upstairs. This is the owner of the building though not the owner of the flat. He went up the slate steps to the floor above and knocked on the door. The woman inside refused to open and said Mr. N was not there and shouted ‘Go away, go away!’ R was irritated that she would not even open the door given that this is a security-conscious building and he really could not have been anyone who didn’t live inside it.
I couldn’t hear what they said, he and the woman, only I could tell R was irritated. I went to our front door and called up to him to leave it until the morning.
Back in our lounge we were discussing why the woman had not opened the door. Perhaps it was too late at night, or perhaps she was too socially conservative to open to a man. R thought she was embarrassed about the water not being on. He was angry and I thought that maybe she did not open the door because he was angry.
A few minutes later shouting started upstairs on the landing and I said to R that maybe the man was shouting to him. It was clear by now that Mr. N was in. So R nipped upstairs to explain that he wanted to know when the water would be on. I stayed behind.
The guy started shouting in broken English about how dare you come and bang on my door and so on. I didn’t hear R’s voice. When I heard the words ‘I am going to shoot you in the head you fucking bastard!’ I rushed up the steps to see the guy hitting R who at that point was slipping to the floor and was shielding his head from the blows. The light from the doorway showed me the red frizzy hair of an older woman who was standing just outside the door with her back to the landing wall. The man was in his doorway. I couldn’t really see his face.
With a slight crouch, as I hadn’t fully stood up after leaping up the steps, I put out my hand towards the man’s chest saying rather pathetically ‘Please stop this, please stop this!’ With my palm up near his chest Mr. N could no longer rain punches down on R, so instead he started kicking him in the head and back. I glanced down and saw R’s glasses on the ground near the woman’s feet. I kept my hand up and kept repeating my pathetic mantra. The man backed into his house along with the woman, who I think was the one who shut the door.
R pulled himself up, grabbing his glasses in the now dark and started shouting at the door as I dragged him by the hand away downstairs saying ‘Come away, come away.’ For once I guess in the hyper-vigilance of my brain I had no difficulty negotiating the steps back downstairs.
Back in the flat and the light three wide lines of blood were running down R’s face. He had a gash on his bald patch, not deep but enough to cause the flow which dripped all down his shirt and onto the marble floor.
Of course we didn’t have any water apart from a half bottle of drinking water so we spent a few minutes cleaning his head up with cotton wall saying ‘Fuck, fuck, what the fuck? Fuck!’
Over a glass of wine we pondered the depth of rage of the guy upstairs and I wondered if he really did have a gun. Again R suggested his rage was fuelled by embarrassment about the water and a strain of masculinity that had not permitted Mr. N to tell us that the water was going off and for how long as that would have involved an apology. He said. ‘I guess we know why the concierge looked scared!’
I again wondered if we had gone too late and whether R had been too stridently annoyed but I didn’t voice this nor the feeling that the stridency might have been intensified by the four hour journalist talk in a bar or by the presence of a wife who made stupid suggestions like ‘Should you go and see what the shouting man is saying?’
We decided that R should write an email to our landlady and say there was no water and when would it be on and who was that in the flat above as it didn’t seem to be the nice lady with two children he had seen there before. I thought he should say that he had been attacked but R did not want to cause trouble.
A few minutes later the doorbell to the building rang. It was the landlady. We let her in and R rushed to put on a sweater so that she wouldn’t see the blood on his shirt. She said that Mr. N had rung her and that he had phoned the police saying we had attacked him. Curiously it had not occurred to either of us to contact the police ourselves.
The landlady wanted to know what had happened as Mr. N had rung her and said that his mother was having heart palpitations because we had attacked him. She seemed to think the mother was a trouble-maker. I thought though that it was entirely possible that she had been scared.
The landlady listened to my telling of the story, which I insisted upon because R wanted to brush it off. He hadn’t been in the room when she had told me the Police had rung her so I wanted her to have our side of the story. She said people typically race to tell things to the Police first.
Then with the deftness of someone who is entirely at ease with the finessing of the correct result, she rang Mr. N and explained that I had sent R up to see him and that R had not gone up for a fight and could he go to the Police in the morning and cancel the deposition and arrange for the plumbers to put the water back on.
The way she put it was that of course he had to protect his mother after R had banged on her door and that I, as the other female, was to blame for the fight itself, as was the lady concierge for sending R up there in the first place. She didn’t query why he had been shouting on the landing, why he hadn’t answered the door originally or why he hadn’t told any of the tenants that the water was going to be off, or why he felt the need to threaten to kill R or why he had to beat him up.
The landlady told us not to worry and that in any case the police were not willing to accept Mr. N’s deposition because he had recently been in a fight with a man whose wife he had had an affair with. She said that Mr. Ns wife had been the one who created ‘léquilibre’ in the house and that she and the children had recently left. She tried to take R to hospital but we assured her he was OK. She replied that he must have Orthodox bones, very hard.
When the water was finally fixed around lunchtime the next day and R had had a long salty bath he went to buy an orchid plant for Mr. N’s mother. She wouldn’t open the door to me so we left the plant outside. I didn’t get the chance to tell her I was sorry my husband had frightened her. I’m not sure R was sorry. He had suggested taking her the plant as a way of fucking a bit more with Mr. N’s head and the plant he bought was, in my opinion, too small. This is understandable as it was her psycho son who had beaten him up.
I would really like to know though what role we women as accomplices have played here. I mean, the mother and I and the concierge lady took the fall and the landlady arranged it like that. I am convinced she was right to think that this was the only way to go. It was specifically designed so that the resolution of the misunderstanding required no apology from either man. This is not to say that I don’t think Mr. N is a psycho – he clearly is. But the posturing that I encourage and that my husband plays into is also to do with me just as the mother’s role remains ambiguous, as is the non-intervention of the lady concierge.
I guess I will never know whether the mother is scared of her son or grateful for his unrestrained protection. I am not sure R would have bothered to try to sort out the water at that time of night if I hadn’t been there. Whatever the case, the three of us involved I’m sure would agree with the landlady that there is a need to appease the men in these situations which are created by and acted out by men.
The bruises on R’ s arm and back didn’t appear until the next day. I didn’t ask him if he was scared. He said he was sorry I had to see that as he was used to this type of thing in his work. I guess he means that everywhere just under the surface there is pent up frustration. He was annoyed that Mr. N never had to admit what he had done. I wonder if it is just crap of me to think that neither had he.
It surprises me that so many women are at the rally today, separate but connected by the yellow headbands of Hezbollah to the men on the other side of the road and more honestly segregated than we are in Christian Ashrafiyeh.
Every time I get into the lift now I am glad I will not bump into anyone on the stairs. My depth perception is just too bad.