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THE SEARCH FOR A MISSING FATHER
Samir leaves the safety and comfort of his family’s adopted home in Germany for volatile Beirut in an attempt to find his missing father. His only clues are an old photo and the bedtime stories his father used to tell him. The Storyteller follows Samir’s search for Brahim, the father whose heart was always yearning for his homeland, Lebanon. In this moving and gripping novel about family secrets, love, and friendship, Pierre Jarawan does for Lebanon what Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner did for Afghanistan. He pulls away the curtain of grim facts and figures to reveal the intimate story of an exiled family torn apart by civil war and guilt. In this rich and skillful account, Jarawan proves that he too is a masterful storyteller.
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Praise for The Storyteller
‘A literary debut of astounding maturity, refinement, and narrative power’
Literatur Abendzeitung
‘Jarawan’s narrative is captivating, fast-paced, and true to life—a fascinating exploration of the question of what it means to be influenced by several cultures at the same time’
Frankfurter Neue Presse
‘His masterful debut successfully interweaves historical events and a suspense-filled investigation of one family’s fate into a novel that deeply moves its readers’
New Books in German
‘In a sweeping style reminiscent of oriental storytelling, Jarawan tells of escape, migration, and a family torn between two cultures. His debut succeeds in bringing a foreign culture into focus and awakens in the reader a fascination with the Land of the Cedars’
Kulturtipp
‘The story of an escape, of a family, and of the Middle East: how the fate of one family is inevitably linked with Lebanon’s history. An enthralling novel which couldn’t be more timely’
Rhein-Zeitung
‘Pierre Jarawan has brilliantly worked Lebanon’s complicated history into his debut novel’
TAZ
‘This book is a masterwork—a debut of great class’
Booklover & Dreamcatcher
‘There are many good reasons to read this book immediately. Above all, it’s a wonderful, terrifically narrated story that will enchant you timelessly!’
MIKE LITT, WDR 1Live Klubbing
‘This new literary voice is particularly melodious and memorable. The Storyteller is an elegantly and unobtrusively narrated novel that shows us what is behind and beyond the narrow stuffy rooms that we call “our world,” our Europe, our West. With this novel, the doors open to a thousand other beautiful incomprehensible worlds’
ALEXANDER SOLLOCH, NDR Culture New Books
‘A moving and wonderfully constructed story, full of beautiful images—Jarawan teaches us about history and the future, without ever becoming didactic’
Tzum
‘An exciting family mystery, focusing on both historical and current political situations; a testimony to the way migrants are torn between their old homeland and their new’
Ruhr Nachrichten
‘A beautiful book full of fascinating storytelling and poetic language that you devour without stopping for breath. If you start reading this book, you’ll want to keep reading it, rereading it’
Leeskost
‘Jarawan has produced a fairytale that could be straight out of One Thousand and One Nights. From the very beginning, you float away on the story as if on a flying carpet’
NRC Handelsblad
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PIERRE JARAWAN was born in 1985 to a Lebanese father and a German mother and moved to Germany with his family at the age of three. Inspired by his father’s love of telling imaginative bedtime stories, he started writing at the age of thirteen. He has won international prizes as a slam poet, received the City of Munich literary scholarship (the Bayerische Kunstförderpreis) for The Storyteller, and was chosen as Literature Star of the Year by the daily newspaper AZ.
SINÉAD CROWE is a native of Dublin, Ireland, and currently works as a freelance translator in Hamburg, Germany. Her short-story translations have appeared in The Short Story Project, and her translation of Ronen Steinke’s Fritz Bauer: Auschwitz vor Gericht is forthcoming from Indiana University Press.
RACHEL MCNICHOLL is a freelance translator and editor based in Dublin, Ireland. Her translations have appeared in journals and anthologies including The Stinging Fly, Manoa, No Man’s Land, Best European Fiction and The Short Story Project. Her translation of Nadja Spiegel’s short-story collection sometimes i lie and sometimes i don’t was published by Dalkey Archive Press in 2015. PEN America awarded Rachel a PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant in 2016. In 2018, she had a funded residency at the Europäisches Übersetzer-Kollegium in Straelen, Germany, during which she worked on the final stages of The Storyteller.
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AUTHOR
‘People often ask me if this novel is autobiographical. It’s not. Samir’s story, Samir’s biography, is not mine—fortunately, you could say. Yet this book is full of impressions—images, smells, emotions—that draw on my own experiences. The image of the satellites all pointing in one direction, for example, is an image from my childhood; I grew up near that street. So I am in the story too, somewhat between the lines.’
TRANSLATORS
‘When we were growing up, Lebanon was synonymous with war. Of course, behind every news headline, real people were getting killed or fleeing for their lives. Translating this novel made us feel like we’d got to know a few of them, with all their joys, sorrows, and human imperfections. It also gave us insights into the challenges facing Lebanon’s younger generations as they try to heal the divisions of the past.’
PUBLISHER
‘Full of imagination and suspense, The Storyteller touches upon such pressing themes as immigration, displacement, cultural identity, and belonging, but above all it’s a wonderfully evocative story about family secrets, love, and friendship. It reminded me of The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini and The Return by Hisham Matar—I just love it.’
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Pierre Jarawan
The Storyteller
Translated from the German
by Sinéad Crowe and Rachel McNicholl
WORLD EDITIONS
New York, London, Amsterdam
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Published in the USA in 2019 by World Editions LLC, New York
Published in the UK in 2019 by World Editions Ltd., London
World Editions
New York/London/Amsterdam
Copyright © Piper Verlag GmbH, München/Berlin, 2016
English translation copyright © Sinéad Crowe and Rachel McNicholl, 2019
Cover image © Mohamad Itani / Plainpicture / Hollandse Hoogte
Author’s portrait © Marvin Ruppert
This book is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data is available
ISBN Trade paperback 978-1-64286-011-5
ISBN E-book 978-1-64286-030-6
First published as Am Ende bleiben die Zedern in Germany in 2016 by Piper Verlag GmbH
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publisher.
Twitter: @WorldEdBooks
Facebook: WorldEditionsInternationalPublishing
www.worldeditions.org
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For
Kathleen
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If you think you understand Lebanon, it’s because someone has not explained it to you properly.
Lebanese saying
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I
How was I to know I’d be haunted by that photo forever?
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Prologue
Bright lights, throbbing sounds. Beirut by night, a sparkling beauty, a twinkling tiara, a breathless trail of flickering lights. As a child, I loved to imagine myself here someday. Now there’s a knife stuck in my ribs, and the pain shooting through my chest is so intense I can’t even scream. But we’re brothers, I want to shout, as they tear the rucksack off my back and kick me till I sink to my knees. The pavement is warm. The wind is coming in from the Corniche; I can hear the sea lapping at the shore and music drifting out of the restaurants along the street. I can smell the salt in the air, and the dust and the heat. I can taste blood, a metallic trickle on my lips. Fear wells up inside me, and rage. I’m no stranger here, I want to shout after them. Their echoing footsteps taunt me. I have roots here, I want to cry out, but all I manage is a gurgle.
I see my father’s face. His silhouette framed in the bedroom door, that last shared moment before my sleepy young eyes closed. I wonder whether time and regret have haunted him.
I remember the verse the old man with the beard had muttered: … then no one responding to a cry would be there for them, nor would they be saved.
Then I remember the rucksack. But it’s not the money or my passport I’m thinking of—they’re gone. It’s the photo in the inside pocket. And his diary. All gone. The pain is so bad I almost pass out.
I am responsible for a man’s death, I think.
Then, as the blood seeps out of my chest: Pull yourself together. It must mean something. A sign.
The men’s footsteps fade and I am alone; all I can hear now is my own heartbeat.
A strange sense of calm comes over me. If I survive this, I think, it will be for a reason. My journey won’t be over yet. I’ll make one last attempt to find him.
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1
1992.
Father was standing on the roof—balancing, rather. I was standing below, shielding my eyes with one hand and squinting up at him, silhouetted like a tightrope walker against the summer sky. My sister sat on the grass, waving a dandelion head and watching the tiny seed parachutes twirl. Her legs were bent at the kind of unnatural angles only little children can achieve.
“Just another little bit,” our father shouted down cheerfully as he was adjusting the satellite dish, his legs spread wide to retain his balance. “How about now?”
On the first floor, Hakim stuck his head out the window and shouted: “No, now there’s Koreans on the TV.”
“Koreans?”
“Yeah, and ping-pong.”
“Ping-pong. How about the commentary? Is that Korean too?”
“No. Russian. Koreans playing ping-pong, and a Russian commentator.”
“We don’t want ping-pong, do we?”
“You might be too far to the right.”
By now my head was also caught up in a game of ping-pong, looking back and forth to follow their conversation. Father pulled a spanner out of his pocket and loosened the nuts on the mounting. Then he produced a compass and skewed the satellite dish a bit more to the left.
“Don’t forget—26 degrees east,” shouted Hakim, before his grey head vanished back into the living room.
Before going up on the roof, Father had given me a detailed explanation. We had been standing on the small strip of grass in front of our building. The ladder was already up against the wall. Sunlight shimmered through the crown of the cherry tree and cast magical shadows on the pavement.
“Space is full of satellites,” he said, “ten thousand of them and more, orbiting the earth. They tell us what the weather will be like, they survey earth as well as other stars and planets, and they relay TV to us. Most of them offer pretty awful TV, but some of them have good programmes. We want the satellite with the best TV, which is just about there.” He looked at the compass in his hand and kept rotating it until the needle lined up with the 26-degree mark on the right-hand side. He pointed at the sky, and my eyes followed his finger.
“Is it always there?”
“Always,” he said, and bent down, stroking my sister’s head before picking up two cherries that lay in the grass. He put one of them in his mouth. He held the other out at our eye level, and, holding the stone of the eaten cherry in the fingertips of his other hand, revolved the stone around the whole cherry. “It travels around the earth at the same speed as the earth spins on its axis.” He drew a slow semicircle in the sky with the stone. “That’s why it’s always in the same position”.
The idea of extra-terrestrial TV appealed to me. I was even more taken with the idea that somewhere up there a satellite was in orbit, always in the same position, always following the same course, constant and reliable. Especially now that we too had found our fixed position here.
“Is that it now?” Father shouted again from the roof.
I shifted my gaze to the living-room window, where Hakim’s head appeared instantly.
“Not exactly.”
“Ping-pong?”
“Ice hockey,” shouted Hakim, “Italian commentator. You must be too far to the left.”
“I must be mad,” answered Father.
In the meantime several men had gathered on the street in front of our building, offering pistachios around. On the balconies opposite, women had stopped hanging out their washing and were watching the action with amusement, their hands on their hips.
“Arabsat?” shouted up one of the men.
“Yes.”
“Great TV,” shouted another.
“I know,” replied Father, as he loosened the nuts again and adjusted the dish a bit to the right.
“Twenty-six degrees east,” called up one of the men.
“Too far to the left and you’ll get Italian TV,” said another.
“Yeah, and the Russians are just a bit to the right of it, so you need to watch out.”
“They’re all playing sports, the whole world—I should play a bit more myself,” said Hakim with a hint of desperation. Then his head disappeared back into the living room.
“My father-in-law fell off the roof once, trying to rescue a cat,” said a man who had just joined the others. “The cat is fine.”
“Want me to come up and hold the compass?” said a younger man.
“Go on, Khalil, give him a hand,” said an older man, presumably his father. “Russian TV is a disaster—have you ever watched the news in Russian? It’s all Yeltsin and tanks and an accent like crushed metal!” He popped another pistachio in his mouth, then shouted up, half-joking: “Should I get out the barbecue? Looks like you might be up there a while yet.” The men around me laughed. My father didn’t laugh. He paused for a moment and smiled the mischievous smile that always played around his lips when he felt a plan coming on:
“Yes, my friend, go and get the barbecue. When I’m finished here, we’ll have a party.” Then he looked down to me: “Samir, habibi, go and tell your mother to make some salad. The neighbours are coming to dinner.”
This was typical of him, the spontaneous ability to recognise a situation that ought to be savoured. If there was any opportunity to turn an ordinary moment into a special one he didn’t need to be asked twice. My father was always cloaked in an air of assurance. His infectious cheer enveloped everyone near him, like a cloud of perfume. You could see it in his eyes (which were usually dark brown but occasionally tinged with green) when he was brewing mischief. It made him look like a picaresque rogue. He always had an easy smile on his face. If the laws of nature dictated that a plus and a minus make a minus, he simply deleted the minus so that only the plus remained. Such rules did not
apply to him. Except for the last few weeks we spent together, I always knew him to be a cheerful soul, tipping along with the good news in life while the bad news never found its way into his ears, as if a special happiness filter blocked it from entering his thoughts.
There were other sides to him too, times when he was stock still like a living statue, set in stone, imperturbable. He was buried in thought then, his breathing slow and steady, his eyes deeper than a thousand wells. He was also affectionate. His warm hands were always stroking my head or my cheeks, and when he was explaining something, the tone of his voice was encouraging and infinitely patient. Like when he told me to go in to my mother because he’d just decided to have a party with people he’d barely met.
I went in and helped my mother chop vegetables and prepare salad. The apartment building we had just moved into seemed very old. There were fist-sized hollows in the treads of the stairs, which creaked at every step. It smelled of damp timber and mould. The wallpaper in the stairwell was bulging. Dark, cloud-shaped stains had spread over the once-white walls, and a naked bulb that didn’t work dangled out of the light fitting.
To me, it all smelled new. The boxes we’d moved our stuff in were still piled in the corners of the apartment, and the smell of fresh paint drifted like a cheerful tune through the rooms. Everything was clean. Most of the wardrobes and cupboards had already been assembled; odd screws and tools still lay around—an electric drill, a hammer, screwdrivers, extension leads, a scattering of wall plugs. In the kitchen, the pots, pans, and cutlery had already been stowed. We had even polished them before putting them away, and the rings on the stove were gleaming too. We’d never had such a big and beautiful home before. It was like an enchanted castle, crumbling a little with age but steeped in the splendour of bygone days. All that was missing was some bright curtains, a few plants, and some photos of my parents, my sister, and me. I could already see them hanging beside the TV wall unit. There’d be a blown-up family photo by the living-room door too. You’d see it every time you went out into the hall, which is where I was standing now.
The Storyteller Page 1
