Guest editor’s introduction:

In the last week of October of 2019 when I arrived at Hariri airport in Beirut, the city was in something of an enchanted chaos. I could see bonfires in the distances and was barely able to get a ride into the city proper. Still, I was happy to be there. The lingering fatigue from the war against ISIS, which I’d been reporting on for the past few years, always seemed to dissipate when I arrived in Beirut—this time even more so. I ended up staying on Clemenceau Street for the week, and spent long and frantic evenings with friends at Martyrs’ Square watching a revolution that, to my eyes, looked like something of a magnificent dance party in those early days. I was all in; my love of this small country and its people was on an ecstatic riff and, conversely, tempered with moments of dark concern only when a couple of nights in a row, I noticed compatriots of mine whom I could tell were mid-level Iranian hands standing in the shadows, taking in all that was happening and chatting quietly among themselves. I said nothing to my friends at the time (no one would have understood the serious implications of what I saw anyway, even if they thought they did). I already knew that the revolution, such as it was, was doomed. 

The months and years that followed only compounded Lebanon’s pain. The revolution vanished. Covid came. And a blast of such monstrous magnitude took place at the port of Beirut that it was said to have been one of the largest non-nuclear explosions the world had ever known. Couple that with the epic financial collapse of the country—after years of a banking Ponzi scheme that reduced a huge swath of the population to abject poverty, while the always-shameless ruling class was allowed to get its cash out and stuff it abroad—and you can begin to get a picture of the sorts of years Lebanon went through. 

In the meantime, I kept going back there. I was searching for something. Or perhaps someone—someone to show me an escape from the self-confining ways of the greater Middle East that I called home. On October 7, 2023, I was in Beirut again when barely two hundred miles to the south, Israel was already preparing to bomb Gaza in retaliation for the Hamas attack of the same day. The wreck and shiver of war was in the air; I could feel it. And at some point, happening to ride my rented motorbike down the streets of Gemmazyeh and Mar Mikhael, I admit I quietly gave a “Fuck you” to all the Western tourists on the sidewalks—the ones who thought they were roughing it in this city, with all the clichés about resilience and liveliness that it has been cloyingly gifted and bullshit-wrapped in for far too many decades. (I’m not proud of this, but then again rage has its own itineraries.) “Go! Get yourself to your god damn Paris and London and New York and Berlin and leave us the fuck alone. War is coming and you have no business here—you who brought these calamities on us in the first place. Get lost!”

And so it went. Throughout the spring and summer of 2024, I kept returning to Beirut every other month while the specter of war crept closer and closer, with Israel and Hezbollah trading fire in South Lebanon. And then one day the war was simply there, here, reducing—once again—so much of the country to ruin, ash and corpses, though with even more cruelty and merciless efficiency this time around. Right up to the last hours of a latest ceasefire, during which I was following the deaths of people over there in real time via the distraught WhatsApp messages of a friend. 

Real time, on the other hand, is something that I have at particular moments had a hard time associating with Beirut. Often it has seemed to me that the city is living various iterations of itself simultaneously—and nowhere more so than inside the shells of the bombed-out or incomplete buildings from a past dating back to the long civil war. These ghostly structures sit or stand tall as jealous custodians to the memory of obliteration, abiding year after year, and gazing back at us as if it were we who trespass. To understand them, to understand Lebanon and Beirut, one needs a diamond lens: sharp enough to cut through the layers of absurdity, cerebral enough not to succumb to sentimentality, and intimate enough to be able to drop us onto the streets of Mar Elias or Sanayeh Park, where we come upon a man and his dog. This essay, “A Man Made of Dust,” is such a lens. Covering the years between 2019 to 2021, the text is a gut punch about an arc of time spanning the heady days of the revolution and its defeat, the Covid interregnum that suffocated the country, and finally, the port explosion that brought it to its knees. An account of how there was not only not going to be a better future, but in fact, there was no future to be had at all—a foreshadowing of the war that finally rained down on Lebanon in 2024, and the indiscriminate bombing and destruction and mass displacements that followed. 

On first read the work struck me as something of a portrayal of fragmentation, damage and malfunction. On second read I saw it as prose poetry. And later still, as a philosophical lament for a people. 

It is none of these, even if it is a little bit of all of them. Beshara—our man of dust in the essay—is, in a way, the Everyman. I have seen him on the streets of my own neighborhood in Tehran more than once. I was just never sure how he came to be until I read about him (and about us), here in our terrain and geography, through the graceful and composed hand of Tarek Abi Samra, translated faithfully and with richness by Lina Mounzer. —Salar Abdoh

—

I saw him sitting on a public bench on Mar Elias Street. Our eyes met for an instant, then we both turned away. I went on walking and he went on sitting on that bench, staring out into the space before him. 

I wasn’t actually sure if our eyes had met, or even that he’d turned away from me. But when I’d noticed him from a distance sitting there, staring into space, I felt an agitation that increased with every step that shrunk the distance between us—and when I was only two or three paces away, his head moved slightly and it seemed like he’d turned and seen me, so I turned my own face away thinking he’d done the same. 

What agitated me when I’d glimpsed him from a distance was his sickly emaciation and his long, disheveled white beard. I’d last run into him a year or a year and a half ago, also on Mar Elias Street, in the fall of 2020 I think—and the excitement that had animated his slender, fifty-something-year-old body during the uprising of October 2019 hadn’t yet dissipated. On that fall day in 2020, his gait was upright and confident, as though he still marched among the crowds, all of them surging ecstatically forward to throttle a collective enemy—whether that enemy was Gebran Bassil, the president’s son-in-law and leader of the Free Patriotic Movement party; Riad Salameh, the governor of the central bank; or Hassan Nasrallah, the secretary-general of Hezbollah. Beshara (not his real name) walked with pride and vigor, as though invincible. As though the protest crowds still surrounded him like some sort of invisible human shield, even though Mar Elias Street was almost deserted thanks to the general lockdown and quarantine.

When our eyes met that day in 2020, neither of us turned our face away. He smiled at me and I took off my mask and shook his hand, and when our hands touched, I realized it had been many months since I’d shaken anybody’s hand—not since I’d started following all the Covid precautions. I’m not sure who reached out to shake first. But I remember that his smile made me forget, for a few seconds, that the air itself was infected, and that the human body is nothing more than a vehicle for viruses. His smile surprised me and I reacted with the involuntary gesture that used to overtake my hand just a few short months ago whenever I ran into someone I knew.

I think my hand moved automatically in response to that smile coming from the past. “Where’ve you been? I’m not seeing you around anymore,” he said, and for a minute I didn’t understand what he meant. Where did he think we might run into one another? Then I remembered: the protests… it was the same smile he wore during the marches and demonstrations, and I realized he was still living in that time, the time of the uprising that had ended months ago. He was most likely still taking part in the few scattered protests that some political activist groups had continued to organize, despite the waning of the uprising and the spread of the pandemic. That’s what I thought to myself as I watched him walk away without my having answered his question. 

As though the roar of the port explosion hadn’t shaken his body. As though he didn’t now hear the silence of the streets. 

I don’t know how long Beshara remained outside of time, or how long he continued to walk surrounded by invisible crowds. But in the spring of 2022, time had caught up to him and shackled him tight, tossing his emaciated body onto that bench where I continued to see him, smoking and staring out into space, and I began crossing to the opposite pavement to avoid him. 

A Dog Named Happy

Eight years before, Beshara lived in a small tin shack in a parking lot behind the Sanayeh public garden, where he served as a lot attendant by day and watchman by night. He owned a little poodle- or bichon-type dog with a thick, curly white coat named Happy. Happy was the kind of dog who looked like he should be spending his days curled on some soft couch in the home of a well-off family, and not tied up with a rope in the corner of a parking lot, barking nervously all day long, and only quieting at night when he retired with Beshara to the tin shack where they both slept.    

Beshara walked Happy two or three times a day. Not in the Sanayeh Garden where a huge, imposing sign that listed all the things prohibited within greeted you as soon as you stepped through its iron gates. For example: Sitting on the grass is forbidden. Eating sandwiches or mixed nuts is forbidden. Playing with balls is forbidden… etc. And so you could forget about letting in dogs. Instead, Beshara walked his dog around the garden and on the sidewalk surrounding the perimeter walls, where everyone had to walk carefully lest they step into one of the piles of feces thickly dotting the ground. The dogs of Sanayeh and its surrounding neighborhoods all did their business there, as if in revenge for the garden being forbidden to them.

From their relatively distant neighborhoods the working class flocked to the park in droves, especially on Sundays and holidays. Public parks in Beirut are as rare as buildings in the jungle, and the Sunday crowds often raised grumbles and ire among the middle and upper classes who called the neighborhood home. Among these two types of people who frequented the park and its environs, Beshara stood out as an anomaly: a stranger to the working class because he walked a dog, and a stranger to the dog-walkers because he was a member of the working class. Otherwise, the dog-walkers only fell into one of two categories: either young people in their twenties and thirties wearing trendy clothes and speaking an Arabic sprinkled liberally with English, the types of people you might run into in the bars and pubs of Hamra street; or the foreign domestic workers who took on the task of dog-walking for their employers, just as they took on the task of wiping their babies’ butts. (Perhaps it’s not out of place to mention here that some years later, when the economic collapse arrived, these domestic workers would be thrown out into the streets to fend for themselves like so many of the family dogs).  

I was one of those people who lived near the park then, and I also walked my dog around its walls. I ran into Beshara and his dog almost daily, sometimes more than once. When I saw them walking together, they always seemed more like two friends rather than a dog and its owner. The sorts of friends who bickered constantly, but also with a lot of affection.

They rarely walked at the same pace. Happy was often lagging behind Beshara, fascinated by the various scents around him, snuffling insistently toward their sources and digging his little claws into the pavement, anchoring himself against Beshara’s attempts to pull him away. Or sometimes he was the one pulling forward, so hard his leash looked like it was about to snap, imagining perhaps that he had a lot more strength and power than was contained in his six-kilogram body. Sometimes Beshara was forced to run to keep up with him. When I saw Happy so excited, spinning around Beshara like a whirlwind, it seemed to me like he was trying to take advantage of every moment of freedom afforded him by that ten-to-fifteen-minute outing—that outing which followed the long hours of despair and bored waiting in the parking lot, and which Happy always received like a miracle, even though it reoccurred two or three times a day. Seeing him whirling about like that, as though he’d lost his mind, I remembered myself in elementary school—when my classmates and I would be struck by a bout of brief but intense collective madness whenever the bell rang to signal our fifteen minutes of recess, and would spend the entire time running about wildly and screaming like unhinged animals.

Although Beshara was impatient and quick to get angry at Happy and his mischief—shouting at him throughout their walk to Stop it Happy! Happy, come here! Happy, calm down!—he was just as quick to forgive him as well. When I ran into him on our walks around the garden he’d often say: “He’s a little rascal, this one.” Gesturing at his dog, a sly smile of pride would light up his face, erasing any trace of irritation and momentarily smoothing away the harshness of his features.  

A Man Made of Cloud

I’d always imagined that Beshara had been a militiaman in his youth, even though I knew nothing about his past. Though I spent years running into him every day, our conversations were always fleeting and mostly about our dogs. But like someone who sees the outlines of people and animals in the random shapes drawn by the clouds, or like someone reading enough meaning to fill a thousand volumes in the grounds at the bottom of a coffee cup, I automatically and without any conscious effort took in all of Beshara’s looks, gestures, facial expressions and physical movements, adding them to his features and appearances and so deliriously conjuring up all sorts of past lives for this man about whom I knew nothing, save for the facts that he was the watchman of a parking lot, that he owned a dog, and that some nights he drank two or three cans of Turkish Efes beer. 

Perhaps I never asked him about his past because I simply didn’t care. Or maybe it was because I loved that blank space surrounding Beshara, and I didn’t want anything indelible to be written there. If one day I learned that he’d once been a taxi driver, for example, or that he’d been married and had children, and that his wife and children had all been killed in a car accident, or that, on the contrary, he’d never married, these words would have filled up that blank space in ink that was impossible to erase. And little by little, word by word, Beshara would have solidified into a specific person, with fixed and unchanging characteristics, while it seemed I wanted him to remain a surface without depth, or a vague being void of attributes—like a fictional character still in the beginning stages of composition, whose features had been sketched out only in the most rudimentary way. 

A City Pregnant with Buildings

I lean more towards the conclusion, however, that I didn’t really care much about Beshara and the question of his past. Because even when my wife told me that he’d suffered a bad accident and was in the hospital, I was only half-listening, as usual, and I didn’t really understand what she was saying or who she was talking about, and she had to repeat her sentence two or three times before it sunk in. That was after the parking lot had been turned into a construction site. Something Beshara had sworn up and down would never happen. 

In the long run-up to that, a rumor of unknown origin had been keeping the neighborhood up at night, and they’d been whispering about it fearfully for more than a year: a huge building would emerge from the empty parking lot and tower high into the heavens. No one knew when the construction would begin, or even whether the news was true or merely empty talk. The truth is that the spread of such a rumor in any of the neighborhoods of Beirut at the time (that time which seems so far away now, even though less than four years have passed) required neither an informed nor reliable source, nor even any basis in reality. All it required was that there be an empty plot of land somewhere—like, for example, a parking lot or a traditional old home. The emergence of buildings from the grounds of this city seemed more like a random natural phenomenon than a planned or purposeful human activity. As if Beirut were perpetually gestating thousands of fully-formed buildings and would suddenly go into labor, trying to expel them however and wherever it could.

As someone ignorant of how the real estate market worked, I’d sometimes look at the huge, modern and luxurious (though often quite tasteless) buildings with amazement, or even a certain reverence. There were two things I was unable to reconcile: my repeated observation that so many of the apartments in these buildings remained unoccupied, and my conviction that their constant appearance out of the ether was evidence that they were generating large profits. That’s what I wondered about the most: where did these profits come from? But I quickly got bored of puzzling over this mystery, and my indolent mind instead drifted over to the idea that there was some enigmatic, magical power residing in these buildings, or rather that they had some hidden essence that made them generate money the way a tree bears fruit. I was like some rube who believed that a goose laying golden eggs dwelled in his bank account, and that this was the thing they called “interest.”

Screaming Stone and Howling Steel

For more than a year, Beshara quieted the panicking residents of the neighborhood with assurances that the new construction project would never see the light of day, and that those who’d recently purchased the property were now short of money, adding that many disputes had broken out between them. He was, in fact, certain that the entire project had never been serious in the first place. But it seemed that Beshara had been lying to himself above all, or maybe money had suddenly rained down from the sky on the heads of the real estate owners. Because early one morning I was woken up by a skull-splitting sound, with the bedroom shaking like it was being rattled by the hand of a giant: the excavation had begun. 

If you’re not someone who leaves their apartment every day for work, to live next to a construction site is to live in a world of pure, unrelenting sound for nine or ten hours a day, from seven in the morning to four or five in the afternoon, or sometimes even six in the evening. A world of sound that is the complete opposite of music, and which represents its complete negation. Music, though it comes from without and enters through the ears, is more like a sleepy stream or roaring river that springs from the listener’s belly, flowing through the body and transforming it into waves that overspill and drift out into space. In other words, music frees the body from the rigidity of the material, from its fixity and self-enclosure, transforming it into a moving, dancing spirit—a spirit that, sometimes, dissolves into the outside world. But the din from a construction site is like a thick acoustic shell that hardens around your body like a steel trap, enveloping it completely, squeezing it, shackling it and preventing it from interacting in any way with the outside world. 

A world of screaming stone and howling steel: this is the world you live in. You hear it in your temples. You hear it in your skull, in the vibrations of your entire body. There is no longer any difference between you and the noise. You are the screaming and the howling, and you are the steel and the stone. You are blind, dumb matter attempting to escape itself, finding nothing but itself. If ecstasy is an emergence from the self, and music a promise of ecstasy, then the construction din is the sound of the impossibility of emergence, of ecstasy.

That’s what it was like to live next to the construction site. I can’t imagine what it was like to actually live inside it. But that’s exactly where Beshara—whose job had changed overnight from parking lot attendant to construction lot watchman—lived. 

Happy now barked night and day, and it wasn’t just nervous barking anymore. It had an edge of madness to it; it was gratuitous, aimless barking, as if issuing from a broken machine no longer fully working, though some parts remained functional. I heard him as I lay in bed, battling sleeplessness, lying next to my wife, who had a knack for falling asleep nearly as soon as her head hit the pillow. 

But it wasn’t the barking that left me sleepless. It didn’t even really bother me. It kept me company, and sometimes even helped me sleep. It allowed me to anchor my thoughts to something concrete rather than drowning in a whirl of existential dread. Among the things Happy’s barking had me dwelling on during those sleepless nights was the fact that my own dog had also begun malfunctioning since the construction had begun. She’d started refusing to leave the house most of the time, and I was forced to carry her in my arms from the apartment all the way down to the pavement around the garden so she could pee and poo on the street. I would feel her shaking in my arms, not the way living creatures shake, but the way machines and engines vibrate, so forcefully her tremors were visible to the naked eye. 

The real problem was that the barking made it impossible for Beshara to get a full or proper night’s sleep. 

His rage would explode out of him in a wild scream every half-hour or so over the course of the night. Happy would shut up immediately. But only for about ten minutes, and then he’d start barking again. Then twenty minutes after that, Beshara would scream at him to shut up again. And it would go on like this for all the hours until I fell asleep. 

At first, Beshara’s screaming bothered me. Not the screaming itself—that is, the loud and disagreeable sound—but rather the waves of pain that radiated from each scream of rage. “Happy, enough!” “Happy, quiet!” “Happy, shut up!” His goal was clear and unambiguous: to silence Happy so he could get some sleep. And his anger too was perfectly understandable: someone who can’t manage more than half an hour’s uninterrupted sleep is bound to get angry. But there was something else in those screams, something entirely wild and even obscene, overshadowing both the words and the rage.

His screams, void of curses, were fouler than any curse. As though all the filth and humiliation his soul had soaked up and accumulated over an entire lifetime were bursting out of him with those screams, torrenting out from an inexhaustible source.

I lay in my bed waiting for sleep to overtake me. Sometimes I wondered: was Beshara himself even aware of those waves of pain radiating from his screams? I doubted it, but I couldn’t be sure. I knew for certain, though, that he was totally oblivious to the sticky intimacy that his screams created between him and his sleepless listener. I felt as though I were eavesdropping on his innermost self. And it was captivating and repellent at once. But this only lasted a few months; habit is like a file that scrapes away sharp feeling layer by layer until nothing of it is left. Where it once both fascinated and repelled me, Beshara’s pain came to arouse no feeling in me at all. And soon I could no longer even hear the pain, his pain. Maybe it continued to radiate out from his shrieks but my ears grew deaf to it.

A Man of Dust

The construction of the building took about two years, and Beshara withered away little by little over the course of that time. He grew thin, turning into a dusty old creature. He had dust on his face, dust on his clothes, and dust on his little dog who had once been white but was now the color of dirt. Dust in his hair, and dust underneath his fingernails and toenails. And probably there was the taste of dust perpetually in his throat. 

He grew thin, and he no longer smiled unless he was drunk. He used to drink only a few nights of the week, but he began drinking pretty much every night, and sometimes during the day. He grew gentle when he drank. The beer quenched his rage for a time, until it bubbled up anew and exploded out of him in intermittent shrieks over the course of the night. 

He could no longer stand his dog except when he was drunk. Whatever affection had been behind their bickering disappeared, while the bickering itself intensified. Every one of their outings around the garden turned into a battle for time: Beshara trying to make his way around the garden as fast as possible, and Happy trying to prolong his outing with all his might. Beshara always pulling forward and Happy always lagging back, digging his claws into the pavement, trying to slow Beshara down and win himself a few extra seconds of freedom. The leash between them always straining—always, it seemed, about to break. 

And then one day, the dog disappeared. Beshara had gotten rid of him. He gave him away to one of his acquaintances. He told me that Happy was now living happily in the mountains. And I never saw Happy again. 

And then, another day, something from the construction site fell on Beshara. A piece of stone or a steel beam, I’m not sure. His ribcage broke—a few ribs, or maybe the sternum. He was admitted to the hospital and then discharged to go recover somewhere unknown to me. Then he came back to work. And a few months later, my wife and I moved from our apartment, right as the building was set to be completed.

October 17

A whole year went by in which I didn’t see Beshara. Then I ran into him in downtown Beirut, during one of the first protests of the October 17 uprising in 2019. He suddenly appeared before me as though out of thin air. He shook my hand, and at first I didn’t recognize him. There was something distorting his features, like he was himself but also not at the same time. 

He never missed a demonstration, march or sit-in. During the first weeks of the uprising, I kept running into him in the different streets and squares of Beirut. It took me several run-ins before I understood that the thing distorting his features was joy. I’d never seen him joyful before. It’s often said that pain changes a person’s features, but I had no idea that joy could also play with a face. His face was bright and beautiful, and I realized then for the first time that Beshara was in fact a handsome man. As though joy had restored his features to their rightful form, to what they should have been all along. 

But Beshara’s transformation wasn’t limited to his face. The way he shook my hand had changed as well. Every time we shook hands it felt as though we were equals. 

I didn’t understand this feeling at first. Hadn’t we always been equals? But each handshake proved that assumption wrong. His hand now moved toward mine with a spontaneity that our old handshakes had lacked. As though those protests and marches were a brief respite from the social roles relentlessly imposed on us. 

To Leave Your Life

I didn’t know how rare it was to see someone so happy. I mean the kind of happiness that isn’t tinged with sadness or bitterness. The kind of happiness that isn’t even trying to make up for sadness or bitterness or pain. 

I believe that Beshara departed his life with the beginning of the uprising. He opened the door and left, just like that, no hesitation, leaving behind the humiliation and pain. He went out to a place of pure joy, but he didn’t know that he was in the nowhere. He thought he’d gone out there as part of a huge crowd, until one day, about a year later, he discovered he was alone in a vast nothing. And so he tried to re-enter his life, but could no longer find his way back. 

The Place Where Happiness Is

He was always there, at the frontlines, where the bodies were crushed up against one another, where people’s eyes burned from the tear gas and their lungs struggled to draw in breath. There in the place of the batons, the rubber bullets, the live bullets; in the place of rage and hatred, and terror and ecstasy besides. Beshara was always there, but I don’t imagine that he was angry or terrified or even ecstatic. Nor was he gripped by hatred. I imagine, rather, that he was happy there, before realizing that he was in a great emptiness.

The Ring

The Ring Bridge, shortly before sunset. A few hundred protesters remain, their numbers slowly dwindling. They stand gathered in small groups, speaking practically in whispers, with a stifled nervousness, fear and caution. They probably despise themselves right now, I think. They despise themselves for their own helplessness. Ten minutes before, about two hundred motorbikes had zoomed over the bridge, their drivers chanting “Shia! Shia! Shia!” Young men from Hezbollah and the Amal movement: most of them teenagers, some of them barely older than twelve, some of them surely not even able to masturbate yet. This time they’d been content just to cross the bridge. They hadn’t gotten off their bikes as they had before, they hadn’t thrown stones or beaten anyone with sticks. They’d crossed the bridge lightly this time, and that had been enough to terrify those who called themselves “revolutionaries.” Because the protesters were more frightened of these Shia youth than they were of the army or riot police; their presence was a clear threat that Hezbollah was willing to use its weapons should the need arise, and these youth, their die-hard supporters, were the vanguard. 

The motorbikes cross the bridge again. The same chant is repeated, but there are a lot less of them this time, only about sixty bikes. As though the day’s battle has already been decided, and there is nothing more for the victor to do than parade around the remnants of the defeated army. More protesters leave the bridge, faster now. I catch sight of a man beating his chest with his fists. A man in his fifties, tall and slender, and as he violently beats his chest he is yelling angrily, “Let them come back!” It’s Beshara.  

He wants to confront the motorcycle boys all on his own. He notices me staring and approaches, a slightly cunning smile on his face. Again, he beats his chest violently and tells me that his bones have knit back together stronger since the break. He’s not angry, as I’d first thought. He’s playful, like a child. With the seriousness of a child immersed in play. 

And God Wouldn’t Move a Muscle

The faces in the streets have grown repulsive. 

They were more piteous a year and a half ago or so, during the period between the end of 2020 and the beginning of 2021. They emanated an astonishment at something that their owners had not yet come to terms with. Faces cast into shock by the humiliation that had befallen them overnight: the people wearing those faces couldn’t believe what had happened to them, couldn’t believe that God could allow such a thing and that the world would just go on as though nothing had happened. They couldn’t believe that He wouldn’t move a muscle to grant them help or succor; that God had just watched everything unfold and not intervened. Not granted them any vengeance. 

They’d been left to their humiliation and fear, and their faces changed so quickly that they could no longer recognize themselves. This is why they elicited pity. It was the astonishment, and the way they begged any onlooker to see them as they had once been, not so long ago. They begged that no one look too closely at their misery, as though this misery were just a layer of dust that would soon be blown away by the winds of time. The streets were crowded with lost, humiliated faces, but they spoke, with each face saying: this isn’t me. 

But now the faces have grown closed and silent, no longer attempting to convince anyone of anything. They’ve forgotten their old countenance and are no longer ashamed of how they’ve been reduced. In fact, they now seem to wear their humiliation with pride, not seeking to disguise it in any way. It is rather the onlooker who feels ashamed at the sight.

He is ashamed of the revulsion he feels when he sees them. 

Sitting on the Bench Staring Out into Space

What is Beshara thinking as he sits on that public bench on Mar Elias Street, staring for hours at the void before him? Is he reliving moments from his past? Is he trying to organize them into some sequence, linking them together to form a coherent picture of his life? A picture, or maybe a story, that would allow him to understand what has befallen him, and eventually urge him up off that bench? Or perhaps he knows that whatever force has hurled him defeated onto that bench is something that happened in his absence, without his knowledge—something that isn’t part of his own story, and therefore cannot be contained by any picture of his life.

Or maybe he isn’t thinking about any of these things. Maybe the space he’s staring into is simply a reflection of the emptiness that has overtaken his mind. 

And Then I Am Before Him

I continued to avoid Beshara, crossing the street to the opposite pavement whenever I saw him on that bench from afar. I didn’t want him to notice how flustered I’d be at seeing what had become of his face up close. But still, I wished I could look at it without him knowing.

And then one day I suddenly found myself before him. I’d probably been totally lost in my thoughts and hadn’t noticed him sitting there on the bench. Too late to cross the street, I thought. We exchanged hollow greetings, containing nothing but our mutual desire to get this over with as quickly as possible and not have to talk or look at one another too long. We didn’t shake hands. He remained seated, and I remained standing. His features were haggard and drooping, as though gravity was pulling them down. The muscles of his arms and chest had withered, the bones of his face grown prominent. The gray had rapidly made its way into his hair and beard. It looked as though he’d aged ten years over the last year and a half. 

Our meeting didn’t last more than five minutes. At first we spoke of trivial things, then the conversation eventually took us to the October 17 uprising and the protests. He told me that he was among those who’d stormed the Foreign Ministry building on August 8, 2020, four days after the port explosion, and I remembered a scene I’d seen on the television that day: feet trampling on a picture of the president after it had been ripped from the wall at the ministry. He told me all this without any enthusiasm or animation, with boredom even, and his eyes were dark and lightless. 

His upper lip moved strangely as he talked, and it took me a couple of minutes to notice that he’d lost most of his upper front teeth. Had he lost his teeth that quickly? I wondered. Or had he lost his dentures? I tried not to stare at his mouth, but my eyes kept going to that dark hole of their own accord. And the longer I stared, the more unable I was to determine whether his lip was moving strangely because he’d lost his teeth, or because he was trying to conceal that black void.

We also spoke about the parliamentary elections set to take place in a few weeks’ time. 

“You think they’ll make any difference, that they’ll be able to do anything?” he asked. 

“I don’t know,” I said, figuring he was talking about the coalition that was being touted as the “candidates for change.”

We lapsed into silence. I wanted to ask whether he intended to vote for anyone, but I didn’t. I wanted to ask him if he had a job, and where he now lived, and about what had happened to Happy. Lots of questions swirled about in my head, but I felt that I didn’t want to hear any of the answers, and so the silence went on and I grew agitated. Trying to return to our conversation about the elections, I said, “Let’s see what happens.”

Beshara patted the bench the way one might pat a friend’s leg and said, “Let’s see what comes of them. I’m not going anywhere. I’m sitting right here and I’m going nowhere.”

Originally published in Arabic in Megaphone, November 2022