Peritus: Underground city

If you ask me now about the worst moment in my entire life, I say: perhaps the moment in the headquarters of "Sti Plus" building... this building standing like a ghost at the same point since its appearance in the late sixties, was hiding from me - it is destructive like this - another world I never imagined existed beneath our world. The worst moment in my entire life. It is even darker than the last hour in my father's life. I will never overcome my father's departure, my attachment to him was pathological, and it will remain so. Whenever I remember him, I am struck with sadness, but that hour, beneath Sti Plus, was the worst. It was the worst because it took me there, underground. What pushed me to jump? I should have stayed where I was perhaps, and called the center on the device and said this and that... What exactly would I have said? I don't know, what happened has happened. What do you always say in your stories? Everything that happened is written. That’s true, now I know that, I didn't think, my body was rushing on its own, the boy in white clothes - jumping like a rabbit - jumped into the depths of the earth. And I followed him. I jumped and slipped into the hole, descending downward, and it seemed to me that I would never reach the bottom, when I was young, in my village in the mountain, I used to go down with my friends into a tunnel under the street leading to the valley. It was a concrete tunnel, carrying sewage water to the valley, we used to go down in it during summer, when it was dry, and as we advanced, the white light grew stronger at its end, there where the sky that roofs the valley... I tell you about this sewer in my village because I once got stuck in it during winter, I remember my screams, and I remember my father when he came to me from the nearby field... and I remember him pulling me out of the sewer and asking me how I got stuck? I don't know what I told him but the rocks below, seemed to me, animals or mythical creatures. The rocks were dark... Why am I telling you all this? Because while I was slipping into that hole beneath Sti Plus cinema in downtown Beirut, I felt myself losing consciousness, as if I was falling off the bed while sleeping. It was a quick, frightening fall, even my brain hit the skull ceiling from the force of the fall... and I kept falling while I remembered disconnected things... until I reached the bottom... I hit the sand... and immediately I saw that I was in a wide white place... I was in a room, something like a room, and behind a small table, or something like a table, I saw three boys, three boys with wide eyes... when I fell, I lost myself... I noticed what I was in when I saw the three faces, long and strange, with their very wide eyes... suddenly the pain exploded all over my body... and I realized I would lose consciousness, before I actually did. And so my fear increased. But what truly sent terror into my heart was the screams of the three boys together at once with one word "Outside, outside, outside!.." Other voices reached me... and I heard a man asking what happened, and I heard a boy repeating one name - as if that name alone was enough to explain everything that happened... again and again: "Yasmina," or: "This is Yasmina." I didn't understand what he was saying, but I was there... drowning in the waters of coma, and in my bleeding blood... I remembered the white ghost, and I realized I was mistaken, the ghost was not a boy but a girl, but where did that girl disappear to? She fell here, and I saw only three small boys behind the strange wall table (later I would know it was not a table but a Phoenician or Roman coffin... like the ones we see in museums...) between dream and wakefulness, between imagination and reality... and between history and the present... and in the labyrinths of narrative creativity, the novelist proceeds with his characters whom he created to talk about a Lebanese war that, with its sorrows, disturbed his sleep... and about the history of Beirut and its magic... and about a reality in which there are places in Beirut and people and characters who influenced him and enriched his imagination... The launch... and the idea that ignited a world full of strange and painful perhaps joyful... the idea embodied by a man working as a guard... Is the existence of this man real... or just a fantasy... and whatever the secret is, it is a fantasy of the novelistic work that takes the reader on wings of imagination to fly... or to see in Beirut or Perithos that city underground, to compare it with Beirut, the crossroads of the earth, with all its find and pains and hopes that sank beneath the ground. Publisher's note: "The night covers Beirut, burning with electricity. We are on the high surface of "Virgin," and Joseph Samaha is cutting a slice of pizza with a fork and knife, asking Walid Nohait about the conditions in Bahrain. Walid says something about the intense heat and high humidity. And another person - I forgot his name - says that all the Gulf people are now in Beirut, look at this crowd, one and a half million came only in these two months, when was Beirut so prosperous with tourism like this, you should thank Bin Laden, if the Twin Towers hadn't fallen in New York, Beirut wouldn't have prospered this summer!