Please replace the wreaths

On a rainy winter day in 1985, Amina and Farid left their home in the Baydoun neighborhood in Beirut for the nearby Ain al-Rummaneh area, heading to the teacher Burgess, a skilled recording equipment expert. Only Burgess is able to save that old strip, the last thing they had left of the mountain house after the displacement. If Amina had known about the strange events that she and her husband would encounter in the reformer's building that day, she would certainly have refrained from embarking on this journey. If Farid had not been so keen on preserving the voices of those relatives and neighbors who went missing in the fever of killing and massacres, he would not have been patient with the frightening darkness of the stairs, a complete darkness that erases the faces of today and through which the shadows of those whose traces disappeared years ago, whether alive or dead, human or demon, are revealed.

مازن حيدر كاتب لبناني وباحث متخصِّص في التراث المعماري. له عدَّة أعمال بحثيَّة بالعربيَّة والفرنسيَّة عن عمارة بيروت السكنيَّة في القرن العشرين. صدر له عن دار الآداب «فورستبس داون» في العالم 2017، «الرجاء استبدال الأكاليل» روايته الثانية.