Loom: A Novel

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177 Th e pla n e t r ip from New York to Boston is short enough for Eva to feel as though she has barely left land. She tosses a bag of peanuts in the air and catches it, which seems to annoy the passenger on her left, a middle -aged woman with bleached hair who keeps shifting in her seat and sighing in exasperation. The plane is full of crabby people who, like her, were grounded by the storm. At least she has a window seat. She turns her back to them and looks out at the sky, which is now a beautiful blue with lovely puffs of clouds hovering about the wings of the plane. The holidays. They were her pretext for picking up the phone to say she was coming, as if without this excuse they might have found a way to dissuade her. Her bags full of goodies, although who knows if her gifts will be enough to deter from the scrutiny they will subject her to upon arrival, weighing in advance the extent of the disturbance her visit will wreak. Books and sweets, she is bringing, women’s magazines and CDs, and nuts from her aunt’s favorite roastery. Photographs, also, some that will sadden them, the line of trees in front of their old apartment cut to widen the road, and, here and there, despite their best efforts to wipe that chapter of their past out of the streets, lingering signs of the war, buildings still riddled with bullet holes, refugees squatting in deserted apartments, their rags drying on the lines. Other photos will cause them to cry out in delight. For this is a Beirut they will not recognize, restaurants and coffee shops spilling out their tables and chairs on sidewalks jammed with people out for a good time, and an ancient city thousands of years old discovered and dug up from the ruin, absolving, with the weight of its age 178 and the gripping tale of its long burial, the staggering disorder. A lively and riotous city her aunt Emilie might recognize. When the war started, Eva and her cousins were too young to know anything except their own tight quarters in the Christian section. They will be dazzled and might envy her this belated acquaintance with a city now spectacularly returned to life. She would have liked to carry in her luggage other things as well, a pinch of soil, a recording of the sea and perhaps, charitably, of the angry honking in the hellish traffic to reassure them, should any doubts have lingered, of the rightness of their decision to leave. She is not sure what they are hoping for, or what they might find too loathsome to behold. Beirut is still alive, in one of her many transformations, still sandwiched between mountains and sea. Something else is unchanged: the ever-hovering shadow of a war they all remember, even the young who, although they didn’t experience the full-scale violence of the civil war, grew up amidst assassinations and clashes. They live with the feeling that they continue to endure, that peace is a long way away. She sees the war in the young men who remind her of other youngsters whose living quarters she had briefly shared, reckless and loud, beside themselves with frustration at the few possibilities available. A matter of time, perhaps. Yet she prefers to think they have been effectively inoculated, that the madness of those times is forever behind them. She likes the clean-cut, mild-mannered, college-educated sons and daughters of her friends, and yet they, too, can profoundly shock her. The Iraq war, of course they condone it while sipping their Châteauneuf-duPape and making plans to go off to Dubai to sign lucrative contracts, and the American empire, and Israel as a counterpoint to backwards, stick-inthe -mud Islam that would have them all living in the dark ages. Of course she is not pleased with the outcome of the civil war, the Christians’ power greatly diminished. But her own life has barely been altered as a result. She skis and dines out and travels, although she knows she is one of the lucky few who still can. Nothing has changed. The same men still in power, and if not they, then their sons and their grandsons. She brings this, along with her bag of goodies. And wounds unhealed. Why should her family greet her with open...