I stuck my head into the living room. Hakim was sitting in front of the TV, which was showing nothing but snow and static noise. He saw me, smiled, and raised a hand in greeting. Hakim was my father’s best friend. I had known him my whole life and I loved his idiosyncrasies. His shirts were always crumpled, and his hair stuck out every which way, lending him the appearance of a scruffy genius you’d love to take a comb to. His inquisitive eyes darted around in their sockets, which gave him the slightly startled look of a meerkat, only more rotund. Hakim is one of the kindest people I’ve ever met, always willing to listen and never short of a joke or some friendly advice. These aspects of his personality are foremost in my memory, despite the things he kept from me for so many years. He and his daughter, Yasmin, had been daily visitors in our old apartment, and when we moved to this address they took the apartment below us. To all intents and purposes they were part of the family.
When Mother and I went out with the salad and flatbreads, the smell of grilled meat was in the air. Some moustachioed men were sitting around a shisha pipe on the small patch of grass. The smell of the tobacco—apple or fig, I don’t really remember—was pleasant, though it made me slightly dizzy. Two men were playing backgammon. Someone had found three sets of folding tables and chairs and set them up in our courtyard, and some of the women were setting them with paper plates and plastic cutlery. Kids were playing in front of the shed amid repeated warnings not to go out on the road. There were at least two dozen friendly strangers milling around in front of our building. Gradually, more people from our street came along. Some of the men had children in their arms. Women in ankle-length dresses arrived bearing huge pots of food.
There’s one thing you should know about my father, a rule I saw proved many times—no one ever refused an invitation from him. Everyone accepted, even if they’d never met him.
It was a warm summer afternoon in 1992 when we moved in. I remember it well. We’d left behind the tiny social-housing apartment on the outskirts, where we’d never really felt at home. We had arrived at last, bang in the middle of the town. Now we had a lovely spacious home, and Father was up on the roof tightening the nuts on a dish that was pointing at a satellite orbiting the earth at a fixed position in relation to us. All was well.
“Are you ever coming down from that roof?” Mother called up to him.
“Not till we get it working,” he called back, taking the spanner Khalil handed him. The men around me nodded politely at Mother.
“Ahlan wa sahlan,” they said. Welcome.
A man tapped me on the shoulder.
“What’s your name, young man?”
“Samir.”
“Let me carry that for you, Samir,” he said, smiling and taking the salad bowl from me.
All of a sudden we heard Arabic music coming from our living-room window. A few seconds later, Hakim’s face appeared, bright red.
“It’s working!”
“Are you sure it’s not tennis?” Father shouted from the roof.
“It’s music!” shouted Hakim. “Rotana TV!”
“Music!” shouted another man, jumping up. And before I knew it, this stranger grabbed me by the hands and had me dancing in circles, hopping from one leg to the other and twirling like a merry-go-round.
“Louder, Hakim!” Father called down. Hakim disappeared from the window. Moments later, Arabic music was reverberating from our living-room window out onto the street. Drums, tambourines, zithers, fiddles, and flutes blended into a thousand and one notes, followed by a woman’s voice. People began to dance, clapping to the rhythm. The children twirled in unsteady circles. The men picked them up and spun them around while the women cheered and trilled with excitement. Then everyone lined up, arms across each other’s shoulders, to dance and stomp the dabke. It was crazy. It was magical! At this moment, there was nothing that would have indicated we were living in Germany. This could have been a side street in Zahle, the city where Father was born at the foot of the Lebanon Mountains. Zahle, city of wine and poetry, city of writers and poets. Around us, nothing but Lebanese people, talking and eating and partying in Lebanese fashion.
Then Father came out of the house. He was limping a little, as he always did if he’d been exerting himself. But he was smiling and dancing in quick little steps, whistling to the music, with Hakim and young Khalil in tow. The other dancers created a path for him, slapped him on the back, hugged him, and welcomed him too with an “Ahlan wa sahlan”.
I looked over at my sister, who was clinging in wonder to our mother’s leg, her big round eyes taking in all these people who greeted us like old friends, like a family they knew well, a family that had been living here for ages.
I lay in bed some time later, satiated, sleepy, and exhausted. The music and the babble of voices still rang in my ears. Snapshots of the day kept flashing through my mind—the dishes of vine leaves, olives, hummus, and fattoush; the barbecued meat, olives, pies, and flatbread; star anise, sesame, saffron. I saw all the different families. The women wiping the mouths of children wriggling on their laps. The men stroking their moustaches while they smoked shisha, laughing and chatting as if this street was a world of its own, a world that belonged only to them. Hakim telling them his jokes. Yasmin, two years older than me, sitting to one side with pencil and paper, her unruly black locks falling into her face as she drew. Every now and again she would brush them across her forehead with the back of her hand, or blow the strands of hair out of her eyes, giving me a wave whenever I looked over at her. And Mother, smiling that private smile of hers. The happy feeling of having arrived. This was our place, our home. Here people helped each other. Here no one needed a compass. All the satellite dishes on our street pointed 26 degrees east.
And in the thick of it all, Father, who loved a party and limped in circles around all his new friends, like a satellite in orbit.
-
2
A few days later, the two of us were relaxing by the lake. The mountain range on the other side etched a restless cardiogram on the sky, spiking into the clouds. We were at rest, though. Father-and-son time. A day to ourselves. At the water’s edge, the densely cloaked fir trees seemed so firmly rooted that nothing could topple them. The two of us on the grass, each holding a sharp stone, with a couple of dozen walnuts on the grass in front of us.
“Careful—try not to damage the shell too much,” Father had said. “Ideally, we want both halves to stay intact.”
I didn’t know what he was planning to do, but it didn’t matter. I was just happy to be here, with him. The days had flown; now the packing boxes were all folded up in the basement, everything had been put away in the cupboards, and the smell of fresh paint had faded. Now the living room smelled of fresh laundry. And if there was no laundry on the line, the living room smelled of my parents, since they spent a lot of time in it. The kitchen smelled of washing-up, or of spices, or of the flour Mother sprinkled on the rolled-out dough when she was making flatbread. The bathroom smelled of soap, lemon-scented cleaner, or shampoo, often with the smell of damp towels mixed in. It all smelled of home. The halls smelled of shoes, but that didn’t matter; it showed that someone lived here, someone who was always going in and out, who came back here, took off their shoes, and walked around the apartment, absorbing the smells of this family. And all around us: more families. Whenever I left the house, someone would nod or give a friendly wave; moustachioed men in berets would be sitting at folding tables near the edge of the pavement, playing backgammon or cards, eating pistachios and blowing rings of shisha smoke around our neighbourhood. I felt at home.
We cracked the walnuts open with our sharp stones, doing our best not to damage the shells. It was a warm afternoon in late summer. Scattered clouds created strange, fanciful shapes in the sky; a gentle breeze whispered secrets across the water. Two dragon flies circled above us. Father noticed that I kept looking over at the fir trees on the water’s edge.
“Shame they’re not cedars.”
Cedars. Even the sound of the word set me dreaming.
“But you like them all the same?”
“Mhmm.”
“Then you would love cedars. They’re the most beautiful trees of all.”
“I know,” I whispered. Not that I’d ever seen any—a fact that bothered me. I desperately wanted to be able to join in the conversation when the men sat around together, wallowing in memories.
“Do you know why the cedar is on our flag?”
“Because it’s the most beautiful tree of all?”
Father laughed.
“Because it is the strongest tree of all. The cedar is the queen of all plants.”
“Why?”
“That’s what the Phoenicians called it.” As always when he spoke of Lebanon, his voice was charged with secret longing and imbued with the undertones of someone speaking about a lover they missed very deeply. “They built ships out of cedar. It made them very powerful traders. The Egyptians used our cedar to embalm their dead, and King Solomon built his temple in Jerusalem out of it. Imagine—our cedars on Mount Zion, and in the pyramids of the Valley of the Kings …”
I conjured up images of everything Father described, as vividly and colourfully as any seven-year-old does when their father tells a story with passion and conviction.
Father often spoke of Lebanon’s magnificent cedar groves. In his childhood and youth he must have spent a lot of time in the Chouf Mountains. He would sit in the shade of the giant, centuries-old trees and inhale the reassuring, resiny smell of a secure future. In the shelter of the conifers, beneath a dense needle canopy, he would sit with his back against a cedar trunk, his gaze wandering across sparsely populated mountain valleys towards the coast, where the Mediterranean lay silver and glittering and Beirut shimmered in the curve of its bay. As I grew older, I often imagined him like this. And again and again, I mistook this image of him for the image of a happy childhood.
From his shirt pocket, Father produced a few toothpicks. From a cloth bag, some red crepe paper. He tore off some and handed it to me.
“For the flags,” he said, and began to tear the paper into small, narrow strips.
We patiently attached the paper strips to the toothpicks, which we then stuck into the nutshells that were still intact. At some point we stopped and looked at the grass, where lots of little nutshell ships lay between our feet. A whole fleet, complete with red flags, ready to set sail.
“Come on.” He stood up, and we went down to the water, which was lapping at the shore. The sun and the mountain chain were mirrored in the malachite-green lake. For a while we just stood there, holding the little ships in our hands, breathing together. “A cedar can grow to be several thousand years old,” he said. “If a cedar could speak, it would tell us stories we would never forget.”
“What kind of stories?”
“Lots of funny ones, I expect. But lots of sad ones too. Stories about its own life. Stories about people who passed by or who sat in its shade.”
“Like you?”
“Like me. Give it a go. Try it with the fir trees.”
As we stood by the water, I thought about the wind swishing through the needles. The sound it made was the fir trees whispering, telling each other about their lives. I hoped that one day they’d remember how we stood here by the water and I tried to imagine what they were saying about us.
As a boy, I felt an insatiable longing to see Lebanon. It was like the enormous curiosity inspired by a legendary beauty no one has ever seen. The passion and fervour in the way Father spoke about his native land spread to me like a fever. The Lebanon I grew up with was an idea. The idea of the most beautiful country in the world, its rocky coastline dotted with ancient and mysterious cities whose colourful harbours opened out to the sea. Behind them, countless winding mountain roads flanked by river valleys whose fertile banks provided the perfect soil for world-famous wine. And then the dense cedar forests at the higher, cooler altitudes, surrounded by the Lebanon Mountains, whose peaks are snow-capped even in summer and can be seen even from an inflatable mattress on the sea far below.
We stood on this lakeshore, breathing the same air and sharing the same longing. In my opinion, after love for one another, there is no stronger bond between two people than a shared longing.
“What would the cedar on our flags say?” I wanted to know.
Father smiled briefly. I could almost sense the words on his tongue as he struggled to find an answer. But he just pressed his lips together.
We launched our little ships. Only a small number lost their flags a few metres along the way; most flew them proudly in the breeze. Father and I stood and watched. He had put his arm around my shoulders.
“Like the Phoenicians,” he said.
I liked that. Me, Samir, captain of a Phoenician walnut-shell ship.
“May they sail for a thousand years!”
“May they return with heroic tales!”
Father laughed.
I have often thought back to that day in the late summer of 1992. I know that he wanted to do something to make me happy, and it did indeed make me very happy. Hardly any of our ships sank. Some of them rocked dangerously, but none capsized. We stood there watching until the very last nutshell was no more than a tiny dot, and I remember how proud I was.
But I also remember how his arm felt heavier and heavier on my shoulders. His breathing became deeper and deeper, his gaze more and more trance-like, as if he were no longer looking at the ships but at some point in the distance. The reason I remember it so clearly is that it was one of the last days we spent together.
-
3
Meanwhile, history was being made in Lebanon. Beirut, once a dazzling beauty, rubbed its disfigured face and staggered out of the ruins. A city felt for its pulse. In the neighbourhoods, people thumped the dust out of their clothes and wearily raised their heads. The war was over. Militiamen became citizens again, laying down their guns and taking up shovels instead. Bullet holes were filled in, facades painted, burned-out cars removed from the pavements. Rubble was cleared away, the smoke dispersed. The huge sheets hanging in the streets were taken down, as there were no longer any snipers whose view needed to be blocked. Women and children swept debris off balconies and removed boards from windows, while fathers carried mattresses back up to bedrooms from the cellars that had served as bunkers. In short, the Lebanese did what they’ve always done: they carried on.
At night, though, when the moon illuminated the freshly made-up facades and the sea reflected the city’s lights, the clicking of boots reverberated through the streets and alleys. But not just there. In the slums at the city’s edges, in the surrounding villages, in coastal towns, and in the mountains—from Tripoli in the north to Tyre in the south—the sound of clicking could be heard. Lebanon was hosting a ball, and Beirut wanted to be the prettiest one there. But the makeup artists were Syrian soldiers. And when daylight returned, revealing how shoddily makeup and darkness had concealed the wounds, the handiwork of the men in clicking heels was displayed on the sides of every building. In the early hours of the morning, people in the streets stopped to stare up at walls now covered in posters of the Syrian president, Hafez al-Assad, who looked back down at them from beneath his neatly parted hair. So there could no longer be any doubt about it. It was undeniable, plain for everyone to see: the Syrians were in charge. And they were going to make sure that people danced to their tune. Parliamentary elections were to be held. The first since the war had ended. The first in twenty years.
Lebanon’s principle of confessional balance means that each religious community has an allotted number of representatives in parliament. It’s a unique system. The country’s many religious groups, who had spent the past fifteen years slaughtering each other, were now expected to fight with words rather than weapons. And the
same religious groups who had battled each other in the city’s trenches were now supposed to sit opposite each other in parliament as if nothing had happened. A general amnesty. Time to close the history book and look to the future. But to anyone walking through the streets of Beirut in the feverish weeks leading up to the election, it was clear that chaos still reigned, except that its soundtrack was no longer gunshots and explosions, but the wild shouting and roaring of election campaigners distributing flyers. Armed with paintbrushes and glue, these commandos covered the neighbourhood walls with posters. They stopped cars in heavy traffic and thrust leaflets into the drivers’ hands. From “I’m your man—in good times and in bad” to “This is my son—vote for him,” the leaflets communicated everything but concrete promises. People took the leaflets home. Many threw them in the bin, embittered by the absurd show going on around them. Others put on their finest clothes and solemnly made their way to the ballot boxes, hoping to take a step into the future. During the election campaign, not one candidate presented persuasive arguments or plans for rebuilding the country. What was the point? Damascus had tailored the constituencies to fit certain candidates. The Syrians, who had first entered Lebanon in 1976 as a peacekeeping force and then never left, orchestrated an election in a country where they still kept forty thousand soldiers, a country where over half the population had only ever known the sounds of bomb blasts and gunshots. Hardly anyone believed the Syrians would actually leave Lebanon by the end of the year as promised. The election resulted in a parliament too fond of the Syrians to let that happen.
The Storyteller Page 2
