A Cat With No Name

Bassem Intervenes

There’s an unnamed stray cat – well, she’s really somewhere between kitten and cat – who has taken to appearing on our kitchen balcony in Aley on a regular basis. Her fur is mostly white, with patches of beige here and there on her body, and her eyes, though in need of a good clean, are green and beautiful. I’m not sure where she spends most of her days and nights but, whenever she turns up, I reluctantly give her leftover pieces of chicken and meat before shutting the door in case she has a notion to come inside. I say reluctantly because I know that once we establish some kind of relationship we will both feel the pain of parting.

I write from experience. In late August 1975, my mother, sisters and I had only just arrived in London for a holiday when fighting in Beirut became so fierce that the airport closed. I remember my father phoning from Jeddah to tell us we would have to stay on a bit longer. That ‘bit longer’ stretched into twenty some years and meant abandoning people, places and pets that had been an integral part of our lives. Our dog Dino, a beautiful Samoyed, was adopted by a cousin in the mountains and apparently spent the first few weeks of our absence barely eating and avoiding people.

Reading through my diary entries of that time – I was a teenager and thought expressing my thoughts and feelings on paper was somehow important – I mostly cringe but also gain insight into my younger self and the impact of being barred from home and from everything I thought permanent had on me. I wrote about longing for my friends and family and home but more than that, it’s clear from the entries as I read them all these years later that it was the details of my life in Lebanon I missed most, all the things that made it precious.

London was expansive, new to me and bold but it lacked the intimacy of Beirut. Its skies were big too and grey most of the time and, despite the lush greenery of its parks which I thought beautiful, to my eyes the city lacked color, the blue of the sea, for one, and its permanent presence, the red soil of our mountains and the passion that drove us.

I grew to love London over the years and also to understand how lucky I had been to escape the hell that the civil war was for so many of those who had had no choice but to remain in Lebanon. But try as I might, I never felt I belonged there. I tried other cities too, in other countries, and still I could not conjure the feeling of home in any of them.  

When I finally returned in 1996, Lebanon had changed but I was prepared to change too if it wanted me to, so desperate was I to belong. And like so many other ‘returnees’, I chose to ignore the broken bits, the sectarianism that seemed more entrenched than it had been prior to the war, the nepotism and corruption this had engendered, the exhaustion felt by a generation of people who chose to put the past behind them because facing it would be too painful, and the warlords we surrendered power to because opposing them would demand from us the kind of resolve and effort we did not possess.

But for a while at least, I found joy in many things: in my extended family and in the absence of loneliness here, in the strong connection I felt to place, to our mountain village and to Beirut, though ramshackle and tired now, and also in the hope we all shared that Lebanon was finally on the mend and that we were somehow playing a part in this renewal; renewal that - though we did not know it then - would not have the chance to see the light of day.

Back to the stray cat. My husband Bassem decided only this morning that she should have a name. We tried out a few but they did not seem to fit. And just when we were about ready to give up, the caretaker’s 9-year-old daughter, Rand, appeared in her pajamas, knife in one hand and a cucumber in the other which she went on to chop and place in front of the cat who - much to our surprise -proceeded to eat it.

“We don’t want her to get used to eating only meat,” Rand told us, a serious look on her face.

Makes sense, I thought, since meat is prohibitively expensive these days.

“Pajamas,” Bassem suddenly shouted, making me jump. “That’s what we’re going to call her. Pajamas.”

Rand looked doubtful. I merely smiled. At least, I thought, the cat (previously) with no name will now have a stronger sense of who she is and, because we have conceded a relationship with her, might finally feel she belongs.