Noura Kiridly
Gardenia Summer

Beirut, Lebanon

the Corniche

an unspoken love hangs sleepily from your neck

* * *

The sound of the Mediterranean Sea crashing against the rocks is enough to break my heart.

Why am I here?

The sea doesn’t always remember she will break at the shore, her disintegrating power left to become suds for babies’ feet.

Madness takes many forms. I like to think of its cycles like the stages of the sea: vast, dark, forever shifting and challenging you to wade its waters. Answer it and it will do the same to you, or anything in its path; push it along, high off of power and momentum, until you are left to mere foam on the shoreline. Stare long enough, and you’ll become the wave watching your inevitable break, sunrise chasing its inevitable set.

What am I trying to do?

The smell of gardenia always reminds me of my grandfather. He was a storyteller, if anyone really knows what a story is, and what it means to tell one. He used to repeat each story and change little details throughout. At some point, the tales would mix until we weren’t sure whether or not he was talking about the first or second war he survived. The Lebanese Civil War and the Palestinian Nakba sounded the same in these stories.

But, they can’t be the same, can they?

He wasn’t here anymore, to tell these stories. Still, the smell of gardenia was there with me and so were the memories that weren’t mine to begin with.

There is too much time now. Summer’s bloom fills the city with dusty sun streaks in hues of nostalgia.

Maybe a little bit of madness, too.

It is five o’clock. I know because the sounds of the evening call for prayer fill the air; each Masjid’s call rings just after one another to create an echo chamber. It reminds me of chorus in elementary school: all the kids lining up to sing “Row Your Boat” in a round. I always hear the prayer clock, but I never see people walking to pray. I imagine the man singing to be at the tip-top of these old buildings, alone in the dome, light shining through the single window. He probably only has water and dates near him, in perpetual fast, waiting to break it. Maybe he hopes one day someone will unlock the door and ask to sit together for a moment.

I wonder if it gets lonely calling for God and never seeing anyone respond to your calls. Do you hear God call for you back?

You must, spending so much time alone.

But, here, away from the godly towers and inside of these streets, it is different.

There is no true loneliness, in a way. Even if you wanted to try to find it, the war would get you. It would find you somehow.

Now, when I say the war, I don’t mean to conjure up images of men in armor and women clutching babies to their chests. It wasn’t exactly like that. Sometimes it was nights that started with hands passing food in a restaurant that turned into people scrambling to get home. Sometimes it was the terrifying quiet the next day. Sometimes, it was losing your head reading news headlines.

This kind of war was everywhere. It sneaked up on you from day to night. It was the kind that didn’t leave even when you left the place it found you. The kind that hits you walking through the streets of New York City. The kind that deports parents and leaves single mothers. The kind of war that hits you upon your return. It finds you again as you walk down the streets of Beirut and run your hand against the chipping paint of old buildings. Keep tracing and you’re bound to feel out at least two bullet holes per 10 steps. I know because I counted once.

And that’s the thing in a place like this: You never really know when those bullets were shot. You never know which war they came from—what side they were shot from, whose grandparents could sit you down and tell the story of how they came to be.

But they all ended up next to one another like they came from the same story.

Five o’clock at the corniche of Beirut. I had accomplished nothing. I think, considering the circumstances, it was understandable.

Time and plot always seem to be weird things to me. Does anyone know a place they can show me where I can make sense of the plot line? I guess that is why it is called fiction. In a story we know we are being led somewhere.

So where am I being led?

And, who is the time-keeper for this story?

Love and war both remind me of each other. I wonder if it’s possible to be in love and out of love at the same time.

How do we honor the dead when we did not do enough during their lives to have the right to mourn them once they’re gone? I wonder if God looks down on us for this. His creation, the backwards race, only able to see after something is destroyed. We back people into corners and blame them for trying to go through the door.

A month ago, I left New York. This is irony, leaving the land my parents called refuge to flee a different sort of war.

Five thirty. I walk to my grandparents’ house, three minutes from the water. Two cats sit grooming each other next to the entrance of my family’s building. Suddenly one swats the other.

I go straight to the balcony upstairs that overlooks the tracks where the horses race on Sundays and old men gather to focus on controllable competition. Maybe living here is easier for them that way.

I light a cigarette and check my phone. Ismael is calling me.

“Hey habibti, when can I see you? I’m leaving for Venezuela tomorrow. Things are heating up there. I have to see you before I leave.”

The last time I saw him was before the travel warnings began. One summer ago, on my way back to New York, he gave me a letter. The ending lines read:
“When I look at the moon, I remember the tattoo on your bare back, allowing me to witness the softness of night.”

“I’ll meet you at the old pub in Hamra.”

I hang up without explaining more. This is the first place I met him. He’ll know where to go.

Ismael was from Venezuela but came from Lebanese migrants. He moved back a few years ago but never really seemed to assimilate to either place. From the first time he met me, he used to yell at me for calling myself “American.”

“First of all, habibti. You’re Lebanese and Palestinian. A daughter of resistance. Secondly, you live in North America, or the States, not ‘America.’ So typical of people from the States, thinking they are the only thing that exists.”

We drank too much tequila that night and talked through the music till four in the morning. Whenever he tells me back this story, he reminds me that he only understood half of what I was saying.

“You have to speak slowly, ya Noura. You North Americans speak like everything and everyone is in a rush.”

His small apartment in front of the university had posters of Che Guevara and Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Two summers ago, we slept through draped sunrises there and hung our clothes on pins to dry between the clay roofs of these old buildings. Things were different between us now, but we constantly retold each other the story of us.

I wonder why lovers do this: reliving the pain and excitement of their love to each other, to anyone who will listen, to themselves. Why did we sit around like our grandparents, retelling our stories of which we’ve tried to escape?

He was leaving the next day to try to organize groups of students against the disintegrating political infrastructure of Venezuela. I think that’s why we got along so well. He was like me, stuck between places. The intersection of Love and War.

I haven’t yet reached Ismael when I get the call from my cousin.

“Where are you? Noura, come now, we have to go home. There is trouble. Streets are closing.”

Everyone around me seems to have gotten the same call. One minute of unanimous panic, and the ghosts of our parents’ war stories clear the streets. Beirut’s best pub strip is empty. Party over. One bomb detonated in Achrafieh. Five blocks from our family’s building.

“I’m on my way.”
I head home. I pass men walking down to the streets. They’re burning tires, an attempt to block the roads. There’s a “NO WAR” sticker on one of the walls and a graffiti sketch that says “WAR MAKES CASTLES AND COFFINS.”

* * *

I want to tell this story in the same way I want to honor the dead. I want to tell this story by honoring the living.

Maybe in the end, all we are honoring is the story.