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OH, LEBANON  EVELYN SHAKIR All her growing-up years, the family spent winters in Beirut, her father refusing—war or no war—to be driven from a city as much a part of him as his own breath. And, except for the year a militia camped in their country house, they still spent summers in the mountains. Like many well-off Muslims (and as long as roads were open), her father and stepmother sent their children to French nuns for schooling. She was the only one they sent to Anglicans. “On account of her English mother,” they explained to friends, who got teary-eyed and murmured, “God rest her soul.” This school or that, to her it didn’t matter. She moved stealthily through the days, from clearing to clearing, from terror to terror. “My father is brave,” she thought. It was her comfort. He was also progressive and very rich. So when, at seventeen—ten years into the fighting—she showed him catalogues from American universities, he saw no problem. Felt, in fact, a tinge of pride. Just never noticed she was desperate to escape. In her first semester at Wellesley, she met a junior at MIT, a black Jamaican with gentle ways, a hint of patois, and arched eyebrows like her father’s. In all innocence, she wrote home about him. From that day, her father—not that progressive, after all—refused her phone calls and burned her letters without opening them. The hurt she felt became defiance, then resignation. “He’ll change his mind someday,” she thought. The summer after the Jamaican boy graduated, she visited him in Kingston. At first, she was tentative, but soon she fell in with the rhythms of the place—calypso, reggae, the spirit of his parents’ teasing . When she held her own, giving back as good as she got, they 157 1KALDAS_pages:1KALDAS pages i-72.qxd 8/3/09 2:35 PM Page 157 were content, just as she was beguiled by green sea, lush hills, breezes perfumed with pimento and frangipani. “Are you bored?” her boyfriend asked when three weeks had passed. “You must be joking,” she said and threw her arms around his neck. “I could live here forever.” As soon as she said it, she knew it wasn’t true. Each day, news circulated of shoot-outs on the street and gangland executions; the murder rate, the papers said, was third highest in the world. When the mayhem got close to home, her boyfriend’s brother-in-law stabbed outside his garden gate, the nightmares came back. Alone in bed, she tossed and dreamed of Beirut, rockets turning night to day, a teenage sniper ogling her from the roof across the street. Nearby, what had been an apartment building. Now just a grid of tattered cubicles, naked, taken by surprise. Then taken over—rats scurrying, squatters camping behind plastic sheeting, a militiaman stirring coffee over a coal brazier or hanging out wet skivvies. And yet you could emerge after laying low all morning in a shelter and know you were safe again till nightfall. In Kingston there was no moratorium. “I can’t live like this,” she told him. He answered that away from Jamaica he would be a dull knife, an empty pod, a dry leaf. Cambridge had nearly sucked the marrow out of him, but at least he’d known it wouldn’t last forever. He tried to blot out her fears with sex. Made love to her whenever they had the house to themselves. Even when she napped in his arms, he was whispering how he adored her golden skin, her green eyes; was bewitched by her breasts, her belly, and this, this! He ran his hand over the hot, wet place. “I love you,” she said. But that had nothing to do with it. Back in Boston by way of Canada, she ran through a series of romances, some exhilarating to begin with, almost all of them short. The philosophy professor who dated his students on the sly—that had lasted a semester; the white-haired poet who wrote sonnets to his mother—he wasn’t on the scene for long; neither was the pianist who cared for nothing but Chopin and Star Wars movies. Spells when she was on her own, she spent her evenings snacking on pistachios— 158  EVELYN SHAKIR 1KALDAS_pages:1KALDAS pages i-72.qxd 8/3/09 2:35 PM Page 158 [3.128.204.140] Project MUSE (2024...

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