Mar Mitr

And in the morning, with the clumsy fingerprints of yesterday's storms still soaking into the windowsill, there is a moment of quiet to pause in, outside the heavy wooden door with its French and Lebanese flags, before tipping down the stone stairs and through the metal front gate. On the other side of the street is a forgotten shell of a building, its stone balustrades rotting away and terraces cluttered with pre-war rubbish. Neighbouring balconies suggest geraniums, and inquisitive green tendrils test the air. The ugly corporate facade of the supermarket at the end of the road is undermined by the minute open-backed van painted in primary blues and yellows that stands by its delivery entrance, disgorging trays of oranges and guarded by a grubby old man with a wizened beard and dubious keffiyeh.

And before you climb onto the number 2 bus, before you hand over your noisome green lira notes, before the bus driver lights his cigarette and blows it all over the baby in the front seat to the tune of Fayrouz, before you clatter along Gemmayzeh and turn left at the vast Pop Art poster of Bashir Gemayel, and long before you trudge up the hill to the wearisome office that is no longer your home, you know that this is right. Even as you walk towards the front gate, the street beckons with an old lady in a zebra-skin hat and patent leather boots, and outside the manoushé shop next door a bleary old man is wearing grey pyjamas over his pendulous belly and cackling corpulently over his morning zaatar. You can look back at the house you came from, at its terracotta pink exterior and questionable art deco mouldings, and remember passing it all unknowing, many months ago. Along the road to Dora there is light over the sea and on the mountains, men already bent over oily engines in Armenian repair shops, grandfathers in peaked felt caps wandering amiably and inconsequentially past the determined commuter traffic, and a pair of indescribably filthy old women lugging sacks of scrap metal in early morning incomprehension and heartbreak.

***

The day before, Valerie gives me tea and keys in the kitchen, and we make a rental contract on the back of an envelope. Mina sits on a third chair and rests her chin on the kitchen table in a doomed effort to appear human, blue eyes faintly crossed. You live here alone? I ask her, la belle Parisienne. Oui, she replies, je suis solitaire. I nod. Moi aussi. We understand each other.

So the pink house on Mar Mitr has another solitaire, with not much money but a room of her own, and who in the mornings pads past the red theatre curtains and the plants dark against the early sunlight, and out into the day.