Book Mark : Living in Beirut: ‘A Tightrope Over an Abyss of Panic’ : Memoir: A Palestinian describes her efforts to live a normal life in a city under siege, and to understand passions that would erase it from the map.

We have paid a heavy price for this community. Let those who would comment lightly on us beware: We are unforgiving judges of those who have not shared our experiences. We are like a secret society. We have our own language; we recognize signs that no one else does; we joke about our most intense pain, bewildering outsiders; we walk a tightrope pitched over an abyss of panic that a novice does not even perceive, let alone understand.

We are provoked to anger and fear by the smallest detail while suffering calamity calmly. We are, each of us, bundles of nerves wound up so tightly into little balls of extra-awareness that we bounce off the walls of our personal and collective catastrophes with an apparent ease.

Every new battle, every new death, every new car bombing and massacre, every new piece of bad news is felt by each of us as a personal injury to be borne silently. A patient in hospital being subjected to an endless series of injections, jabs and other ignominies will eventually cease to protest and will lapse into quiet endurance, even as each jab is felt by every nerve in his body.

So, at all costs, we doggedly, stubbornly carry on, but always with an obsessive eye on the outside world against whose established reality we measure our own, fraught with doubt.

Today, the Beiruti’s eye is constantly confronted by buildings in various stages of collapse; broken glass and torn awnings; dangling and broken electric signs: that once glittered in advertising gaudiness; shabby, dirty, overcrowded streets; blocks full of refugees, their children playing in the piles of rubbish scattered here and there, monuments to the war; telephone and electric lines hanging loosely from bent poles; stray dogs and cats, diseased and slow, sniffing at the garbage on empty corners.

Ancient ruins are, somehow, beautiful and uplifting; the imagination works on them, restores them to their original state and function and brings those who built them to life. Modern ruins, however, are ugly and depressing. It is not the imagination but the memory that works on them, and there is nothing sweet in the memory of war.

The ear, too, is constantly affronted not only with explosions, bullets, screaming jets and sirens, but also with the sound of glass shattering (or, later, the so-familiar sound of glass being swept up), of the anarchic traffic negotiating ever narrower streets and smaller neighborhoods. Now, the most recent irritant is the sound of an ever-increasing number of intensely noisy generators lining the streets or perched high up on balconies, making a deafening roar. When and if it ever comes, peace will mean to us quiet as much as anything else.

Our horizons have been so narrowed by the war that we suffer a terrible form of claustrophobia and, every now and then, remind ourselves of the old days when we would drive for hours to get somewhere far away. . . .

Now we are confined, not only each to our own city and town but even to our own quarter in the city. The confinement is not only physical but social as well. I look in my telephone book sometimes and read it to remind myself of the existence of people whom I have forgotten, to see if there isn’t someone around whom I can visit as a change from my few remaining friends. My friends’ words, motions and gestures are so predictable that I can anticipate them, and often I feel I may as well talk to myself (which, by the way, I have caught myself doing once or twice). But the telephone book yields nothing but a profound depression.

I read the names of those who have moved away, gone to America, England, Amman or Athens; those who have died, some naturally, some violently; and those whom I no longer care to see. I have shed people in rather the same way as I have shed clothes that no longer fit, or whose shape no longer appeals to me, and put them away. In a strangely morbid way, however, when the old telephone book is worn out and tattered and I start a new one, I mechanically copy into it all the names and numbers, including those of the distant and the dead, as though by this doubtful magic I would resuscitate them and the old days, as though I would erase the last terrible years.

April 28, 1989: The water came (on) this morning! I poured it on the plants. What a pleasure it was to fill the watering bucket over and over again and to soak the leaves, the soil; to see the geraniums lifting their drooping heads at last. I gave them shower after shower and felt intoxicated at the feel of my wet feet as the excess water splashed on the floor.

May 11, 1989: The other night in the shelter I saw a cockroach. It was an enormous one, a member of a flying species that thrives here especially in the hot months. Often in the summer, one of these creatures would fly in through the window and the whole household would be in pandemonium, so disgusting are they. Cushions, brooms, shoes, anything at hand would be held up in the general mobilization against this invidious intruder; and everyone would shudder when it was finally tracked down and crushed, its remains swept up and flushed down the toilet.

That night in the shelter, I felt no such revulsion. I watched the cockroach crawling in the corner near which I sat and wished it no harm, feeling that it was a kindred spirit, a creature, like me, of dark hidden places, living out its life in ignominy.

1990 by Jean Said Makdisi.

Reprinted with permission of Persea Books.

Book REVIEW: “Beirut Fragments: A War Memoir” is reviewed on Page 2 of today’s Book Review.