Block 82

By R. H. Duncan

Nadia and Tony are looking for a light when war and invasion are leaving a shadow of desensitization over the people of Lebanon. In the end, they try to keep hope during the 1982 invasion by looking to God, but the paradox is, the war is about God.
Ibrahim’s family is trying to escape their religious persecution, war, and despair. The characters are struggling against all odds to survive something they have no say. Jawaher Ibrahim needs to keep her family safe and survive the bombshells and the jetfighters attacks. Hashem tries to escape his country’s ailments through drinking. Marwan is trying to keep the family together in the middle of gruesome bombings. Laila is fighting quietly for whatever is left of her family.
They are all caught in a cobweb of intriguing events. They want to keep their humanity as they watch their friends and family damaged from the drugs, rape, and killings that coexist with their battle to reach a resolution.
In all this whirlpool, love is blooming. Would love triumph over war?

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Jun 17, 2019
• ISBN: 9781532074516

R. H. Duncan

Rima Haidar-Duncan was born in Beirut, Lebanon. Her father was a Literature teacher and a writer who came from Feudal family that had a title name Bay or Bek. They came originally from the Beqaa valley. The family had different origins in blood. Her mother was a housewife who instilled in her a sense of pride. Rima's family lost the financial comfort for many reasons. Her country witnessed a bloody civil war that led to an economic crisis that depreciated the price of the Beqaa's lands. She worked for the English Department in Assafir Newspaper in Beirut. In the beginning, she wanted to be a professional theater actress. She acted in a Children's play for a professional theater. She didn't pursue the career. The situation in Lebanon escalated, and her family suggested for her to leave to Cypress. Rima didn't stay in Cypress. She traveled to different places, and one of the stations was Boston because she received the Hariri scholarship to study at Boston University. After that, Rima went to London, England but didn't want to stay there and came back to Boston then went later to Kansas and San Francisco and resided in Kansas there with her family and two girls. She worked as a freelance researcher for a while for a professor at Kuwait University. She began her writing in the 90s. Currently, she teaches at Wichita University for Intensive English Program and Communication in Butler Community College.

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Copyright © 2019 R. H. Duncan.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

The Characters and events depicted in this novel are based on fiction. Any similarity to actual persons, living or dead is purely coincidental. Certain parts in the novel are nonfiction based on factual events in 1982, but few changes are added to fit the writing of the novel.

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ISBN: 978-1-5320-7452-3 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-5320-7451-6 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2019906163

iUniverse rev. date:  06/17/2019

Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

If people cannot write well, they cannot think well, and if they cannot think well, others will do their thinking for them. George Orwell

To my father and mother and my brothers who taught me ethical responsibilities and how to be free.

To Meera and Sama my life, my daughters, and my inspirations.

To my husband, Chris who stood by me with all my mood swings.

Chapter 1

On the day Sami Harb was killed, the sky was painted in gloomy gray hues all the way down to the horizon.

When Nadia Ibrahim heard her brother Marwan saying, Sami is gone, she was silent. She was numbed by the news and felt as if planets were silently fighting each other inside her. Her brother was feeling down, but she thought he had taken the news well. The night was young; Nadia was watching TV with her brother and mother.

At eight in the evening, Marwan poured some whiskey. It was a sad day for him; he had lost a young friend. Her brother kept drinking and drinking; by eleven, he was wasted and had sung the traveling of Sami from this world to another. He said, Nobody cries for your death, brother. His grief was epic. He sat on the floor sobbing.

Oh God! Nadia thought. She was fighting with all her strength not to cry, but tears were falling from her eyes. She wept but didn’t know if she was crying for her brother’s sadness or Sami’s death. She lost herself in that sad journey for a while and then noticed her mother, Jawaher Ibrahim, crying quietly. It was melancholic. She tried to calm her brother down, and then Jawaher said, Let him release it. The moment was painful.

The next morning, as usual, Nadia was drinking coffee and trying to prepare for the day in her office at a highly recognized Development and Training Educators and Managers (DTEM) company in Beirut. She was always busy because she was an executive secretary who had to deal with all branches of the company, serve as a liaison among all the CEOs and employees, and handle the news releases and newsletters. She had no energy and was depressed about something, but she was not allowed to express her emotions because society didn’t see that as proper behavior for a woman.

Zeina, a coworker, came to the office and told Mrs. Smith, Nadia’s boss, who was of English origin, about someone who had been slaughtered on the green line between East and West Beirut. Zeina told Smith, He probably deserved to die. He was a drug addict.

Nadia listened to the conversation mesmerized, but her heart was filled with pain and mixed emotions because something in her didn’t want to believe what she had heard. She asked innocently, Whom are you talking about?

Zeina said, The guy who was killed yesterday trying to cross the line for a little dope. His name is …

Sami, Nadia said.

Yes.

How can you judge his death? Leave that to God.

Zeina said, The facts speak for themselves.

Nadia knew the absurdity of arguing, so she left it open, yet she was sad for being incapable of expressing her grief concerning a friend of the family no matter where he had come from or whatever lifestyle he had followed. In a land that judged women for speaking their minds, a woman would consider it not worthwhile discussing another person’s feelings about a junkie; that would have been considered a social slap in the face, as if she were analyzing a whole system of values and the culture itself. What is human, and what is not? Nadia wondered.

At that time, no one knew what would happen next. People received bad news after bad news; good news was always a surprise. It was the eighties, and Beirut was being torn up in a civil war. The threat that Israel might invade Lebanon at any minute was a reality though Israel already had a big part of southern Lebanon in its hands.

Lebanon had been engaged in a civil war since 1975. Many countries were involved in keeping it burning on every front. The Lebanese assumed they were fighting for a cause, but it was elusive. The question was, Who would give the fighters and the guerrillas the weapons to keep the war going?

Dusk was satanic, smoky, and gray. Nadia felt paranoid, as if someone were after her. She was always living on the edge and somewhat excited. It was the war. Some people called it civil while others called it political. However it was defined, it was bloody hell. Yet it was a thrill—shelling, bombs, and cars exploding were the norm, and politicians were playing the war game and executing it.

Nadia went to bed early that night. At two in the morning, she woke up sweating and feeling scared, but she didn’t know if nightmares or the echoes of faraway bombs had woken her. Many mixed images arose—of her dead father, Sami, school friends, and cousins. All had died either by car explosions or because of sporadic bombings. That was a fact. Nevertheless, it was unreal, like a surrealistic painting hung over her old great-aunt’s wall. It was fear of death, of being mutilated and handicapped. She believed that if Salvador Dali came to town, he would thank them for giving him all the imagination he required. It was stifling.

In the morning, she went to work unmotivated. She was in her early twenties and did not know what she wanted except to be successful in a career of her choice. What a choice, what a high price she had to pay—either lose a nation or descend into eternal nostalgia and pain.

The company Nadia worked for taught management by objectives and implemented new technology, which many companies in the Middle East and Cyprus lacked at that time. Beirut was at war with itself; mottos, values, and principles had been flushed down the toilet. Death was the norm, a fact people realized when they traveled to another country and noticed the difference. In Beirut, everybody had become callous, inured to what was happening; they went to work as if everything were running normally.

Nadia, however, refused to embrace her reality. She had to leave the madness in which she had no say. The warlords decided to change the futures of thousands of people, including hers. She was average height with beautiful brown eyes that were alert and intelligent. She was attractive, sensitive, and tender but also stubborn. She thought, I have to get out. It was 1982, and she had thought of leaving for Europe or North America so many times before but could not for two reasons—her lack of money and her love-hate relationship with a man.

Sami’s death made her question the social standards she had rejected. She was proud of her debonair background but couldn’t stand the social hypocrisy. She stood aloof from the most important social standard. She hated when someone called her a feminist just because she was a humanitarian. She didn’t need any clichés stigmatizing her. Feminist, gay, liberal—those were words that could characterize certain Lebanese all their lives. She thought people should be free to do what they wanted and desired, but then she thought that might be a luxury in wartime.

So many things in her society alienated and made her wary of others’ thinking and perceptions. Religious fanatics, whether Christians or Muslims, and political chaos, which was misunderstood by the West, were tearing the country apart. Those who refused to take sides were suffocating. Beirut was a wasteland; people felt their lives had no purpose. The young generation lived in despair. She felt a connection with Anton Chekhov, who wrote Uncle Vanya; he had defined the feeling of hopelessness without boundaries of time or place.

A person was defined not by who he was but by others’ perceptions of him, of whatever brand had been burned permanently into his or her forehead based on opinion rather than fact. Hypocrisy existed everywhere, but people could become what they wanted to become. In Beirut, however, Nadia thought that even those who succeeded were boxing themselves into a corner based on external factors such as their political affiliations. Nadia felt like Don Quixote; she was more concerned about others’ worth than their social standing. A dead writers’ society, you might call. Ironically, the first publishing house in the Middle East was established in Beirut.

Life started to be difficult when Nadia did not set goals for herself. Her boyfriend was studying electrical engineering at the American University in Cairo. She thought he had a future, but she did not know what problems she would encounter. A lack of money in a society that worshipped brand names and appearances was a bad omen. Her family was facing hard times financially. Hers was a feudal family that owned lands in the Beqaa Valley; they went back in history to Iraq of the Shiite sect. They were left with some lands on her father’s side called the White Valley and one large piece of land on her mother’s side called the Red Mountain Inferno section. The inheritance they had received from her father could not save them financially because the war had depressed prices for land in the Beqaa Valley.

The war slaughtered certain classes and those with certain family names, especially those who did not sell weapons or drugs. It was social suicide that could be affected by social factors, and Nadia felt that the bougie class, which had had much before the war, would have nothing after it.

Along with a widowed mother, Nadia had three brothers, all older—Rehan, Marwan, and Hashem. Hashem, the youngest, had married in 1980 and moved in with the family the following year. Rehan, the eldest, lived in Europe and took care of the family since the death of Nadia’s dad in 1975. Marwan wasn’t married and had a house, but he stayed with his mother on and off.

The war was devilish and evil in the early eighties. Marwan sold a piece of land because the family was in need. The family spent the money fast, and Nadia could not understand why her brother was selling land. The only justification she got from Marwan was The occupying soldiers with the drug lords in Beqaa forced us to sell one piece of land since it is of strategic interest to them. If I didn’t sell them the land, they would create an accident for one of us.

In this whirlpool, Nadia was studying to finish her BA in French literature and working at the same time. She had been a successful amateur actress; she had played a part in a children’s play staged at the National Theatre in Beirut. Her dream was to become a professional actress. Though art and acting wouldn’t put food on her table, she considered them to be like writing poetry. She couldn’t justify not pursuing an acting career; she knew she was an artist. It ran in the family. Her father had been a writer who had died without having achieved his dream of owning a publishing house.

Marwan was a criminal defense lawyer, Hashem was a journalist, and Rehan was a physician in Grenoble, France. Marwan was the first one to recognize Nadia’s talent as an artist. He said, I think you’d better start an acting career and get an audition. They’re looking for people like you.

Nadia asked, Who? And how do you know?

I showed a playwright and director your photo and told him how much you liked art and specifically acting. He was impressed, and he said to bring you in right away for an audition.

You’re encouraging me to become an actress?

Yes, of course. You’ve got what it takes, Marwan said.

I’m impressed. I didn’t know anyone believed in me.

Nadia was surprised by her brother’s comments. She thought he was the most conservative of her brothers regarding women’s issues. However, he was the one to discover the artist in her and to push her in that direction. He had to believe in her talents because different social stratifications in the Middle East looked at art with no respect and associated it with prostitution and drugs. Though it was war, not the normal situation in Beirut, people kept living their lives against all odds.

For a while, life looked like a shining path for Nadia. However, the problem was the commitment she had made to her boyfriend. Would he, a man she might spend the rest of her life with, understand her ambitions, dreams, and aspirations? She would feel depressed whenever the idea of marriage crossed her mind. But I love him. Why do I feel this way? Am I having second thoughts? It was not until later that she learned it was natural to have last-minute doubts. Like a child, she wanted someone to tell her what to do. She needed a guide though she was twenty-two. Everyone was there, but she had no one to ask. It was a Mediterranean family—warm and full of ambiance, noise, and joy, but when it came to communication, it had its problems.

Since the death of Nadia’s father, life had not been the same in the Ibrahim household. No sense of leadership. Nadia considered the situation to be like that of their culture: Everyone’s a leader. No local freethinkers can lead, only outsiders can. It’s a shame. Unity is power. It’s a cultural, regional illness and problem.

One day in April 1982, Nadia was in a spacious office preparing news releases and newsletters for training programs in other branches outside Lebanon and memos directed to the employees in Beirut and the board of directors about a luncheon meeting the next day in the conference room.

There were two desks in the office, one for Nadia and another for Mrs. Smith, the manager. Nadia finished typing everything. She sent the memo within the company and mailed two hundred copies of the news releases and newsletters to training programs in Tunisia, Egypt, and Cyprus.

At the meeting the following day, she met Mr. Shamaa and Mr. Badi, prominent Palestinian figures. Nadia had many questions about the political backgrounds of those on the board of directors. After everyone had left the luncheon, Nadia found an opportunity to ask her boss, Are these political figures we met running the company?

Smith