gown and slippers and looks pale without her usual make-up.
‘Reminds me of the American embassy bombing in 1982,’ she continues, shaking her head. ‘That’s exactly where the smoke came from then.’
‘It’s Hariri,’ someone shouts up the stairwell moments later. ‘I just heard it on the news.’
We look at each other. ‘Hariri?’
Hariri is the billionaire businessman who served as prime minister for two terms after the end of the civil war. A larger than life character, he is credited with being the driving force behind Beirut’s reconstruction efforts and, most recently, has been pushing hard for changes in the country’s electoral laws.
‘Why would they want to kill him?’
‘Layla!’
I look up to see Margo gesturing from above, her mass of white hair more unruly than usual.
‘Come up, sweetheart.’
I run up the stairs and wrap my arms around my old friend. I seem unable to stop myself from shaking.
‘Something terrible has happened, Margo, I’m sure of it,’ I say, hearing the shrill of ambulance sirens in the distance.
We step inside and Margo turns on the radio in the kitchen.
‘Try one of the local stations,’ she tells me with her grainy voice. ‘You can translate the Arabic for me.’
It takes me a few moments to adjust the dial on the radio. I sit down to listen. The announcer’s voice falters as he speaks. I eventually turn to Margo.
‘Oh, my god. It is Hariri. They’re saying a huge car bomb has targeted his motorcade. They think he’s among those who have been killed.’
Margo frowns.
‘It sounded like a massive explosion. And at this time of day there would have been lots of people about on the Corniche.’
She pulls open a kitchen drawer, takes out a packet of cigarettes and a lighter and sits down on one of the stools by the sink.
‘I suppose any one of his political rivals might have done it,’ I say, shaking my head. ‘Or even an outside power. They’ve all been known to try to settle their differences with violence.’
‘Poor man,’ Margo says.
‘How could anyone do such a terrible thing?’
She reaches up and attempts to smooth back her hair.
‘I don’t know, sweetheart. But it’s hardly the first time something like this has happened in this country, is it?’
‘But we thought all that was long over, Margo. We’ve had peace for a while now. Surely it should have lasted longer than this?’
‘It’s no use trying to understand,’ she says, removing a cigarette from the packet. ‘Violence isn’t supposed to make sense.’
You should know, Margo, I begin to say but stop myself in time.
‘I dread to think what might happen next,’ I murmur instead.
Margo lights up.
‘No one can know that, Layla.’
It is not the reassuring answer I had been looking for.
‘You’re right, Margo,’ I say, feeling a little foolish.
‘It’s alright, sweetheart,’ she says gently. ‘It’s normal to want to be reassured at a time like this.’
By the end of the day, the death of Hariri is confirmed, along with the deaths of fifteen others, some from his entourage as well as some innocent bystanders. I watch the terrible images on the television. The huge crater in the road, the damage to surrounding buildings, and what look like charred human remains amongst the shattered glass and rubble. There is a great deal of speculation on the news about who might have carried out the assassination and grim predictions about the likely consequences.
For the first time since my return to Lebanon, I ask myself if I did the right thing in coming back. I could have continued to enjoy a quiet life in Australia where my parents and I had fled years earlier because of the civil war here. Mixed in with the anxiety and fear, I’m also feeling angry about what has just happened. How dare they do this after all that this country has already been through?
I sit on the sofa in my small living room with a blanket wrapped around me and eventually fall into an uneasy sleep.
I grew up in a neighbourhood not far from the waterfront where spring rains sometimes flooded the streets and, in summer, whiffs of sea air provided relief from the dank, persistent heat. My father and his brothers owned a petrol station on the Corniche of Ras Beirut, and my mother, a beautiful woman with a calm demeanour, taught at the school that I attended.
I remember childhood as a breezy existence that was only interrupted when civil war broke out, the grown-ups around me taking on a sudden heaviness in their manner, an anxious air, their brows often furrowed. Throughout the turmoil that ensued, my parents continued to love me quietly, not without intensity, but modestly and with deliberation, a love that did not demand reciprocation but rather offered me a good measure of freedom. Encouraging my progress in whatever I attempted to do, they did not push me to prove myself, and whenever I went to them for answers that no one else seemed able to provide, they would consider my question seriously before giving a reply, building in me a sense of self-worth that would stand me in good stead in later life.
Of those childhood years, I also remember the fragile feel of my body, long, thin limbs and my heart beating through my chest. I would run with a host of other children in the neighbourhood through the streets and across the busy thoroughfare. Then, sensing the growing strength that was mine, climbing over the blue railing at the edge of the promenade and onto the boulders on the other side, I would breathe in the sea air and watch the fishing boats bob up and down in the water.
After enduring several years of Lebanon’s sectarian and bloody civil war, my parents packed up all our belongings and moved to Australia to start anew. Arriving in Adelaide, we were warmly welcomed by relatives who helped my mother and father find work and eventually a home of our own. I was an adolescent then, awkward and unforgiving and unwilling to join in the grown-ups’ apparent enthusiasm for this new adventure. Still, as soon as life began to take on a predictable pattern, I was sent to the local school and eventually settled into the reality of being so far from the only home I had ever known.
We lived in a bungalow in the suburbs that had lemon and orange trees in its small garden and a front lawn that I liked to walk on barefoot, the newly mown grass rubbing against the soles of my feet and making them tingle. On Saturday mornings, my mother would take me into the city for hot chocolate and dessert at one of the cafés in the central shopping district. We would talk and browse through the shops and return home to find my father in the living room watching television or, when it was warm, in a straw hat and sunglasses relaxing on a deck chair in the garden.
Now my parents seemed like different people, took on separate selves that had not been apparent before they left Beirut. There were moments also when my own life seemed illusory and undeserved, until I felt I might one day have to rouse myself from it and face reality, though I did not know when or how that would happen.
I made friends, children like myself from a rapidly growing Lebanese diaspora, as well as young Australians to whom I felt attracted because they were boisterous and happy and unburdened by complicated pasts.
With time, I began to see those intervening years between leaving Lebanon and longing to return to it as a reprieve, an opportunity to garner the strength I would eventually need once I went back. I got through high school as if in a dream and once at university felt as though I was discovering another dimension to myself, one that was adept at maintaining this dual existence with composure. Then, after gaining my doctorate, I worked for a few years, making plans to go back home despite my parents’ inevitable objections. I cannot, I told them once it came time to