The Storyteller

by Pierre Jarawan

  8

  In the 1990s, the political climate and the world around me changed dramatically. Not that I was paying much attention. I was too caught up in the crazy, lurid decade that marked the end of the analogue era. Swept along by a generation that refused to let anything spoil their fun, ignoring the many warning fingers pointing to the future. We had no battles left to fight. The Cold War was over, the Berlin Wall had fallen, the Twin Towers were still standing. The only obstacles we faced were ones we imposed ourselves.

  When I left our house, the world tasted of Center Shock chewing gum, Chupa Chups lollipops, flying saucers, and chocolate marshmallows stuffed inside a bread roll. All of them purchased with fifty-pfennig coins from a grossly overweight man at the train station kiosk who smelled of fried food and ketchup; we called him Jabba the Hutt. I grew up in front of the TV with the Gummi Bears, Darkwing Duck, and Chip ‘n’ Dale, and later MTV, Beverly Hills 90210, and Baywatch. By the time I was into The X-Files and Pulp Fiction, I’d started shaving. My face was changing too. As a boy, I’d taken after Father, with my round head and curly hair. But the older I got, the more like Mother I became. My features became more pronounced and my hair got straighter, changing from black to dark brown. Father’s eyes were the only feature I still had. Time had it in for me—having robbed me of Father, now it was robbing me of almost every reminder that I was his son.

  The years raced by. The schoolyard began to divide into camps: indie kids, skaters, ravers, hip-hop heads. I hung around on the fringes without really belonging to any of them. As a pimply fourteen-year-old, I sneakily started wearing Father’s oversized leather jacket and smearing gel in my hair. I’d skulk in front of the booming ghetto blasters, smoking and coughing and drinking sugary alcopops. We’d stopped swapping football stickers; now we swapped porn. Don’t ask me where Sascha got the films. “Trade secret,” he’d say. Known as the Porn King, Sascha spent most of his time loitering in the school corridors wearing his trademark popper tracksuit bottoms. He carried on like a drug dealer, darting sideways glances to check no one was coming before producing the video CDs from his rucksack. I wasn’t able to watch them at home, but now and again I’d watch them in other boys’ basements, where we also played Monkey Island 2 and Duke Nukem, scattering crisp crumbs and inhaling the smell of heating oil. Down here, the sound of the nineties was shoot-em-up video games, the maddening dial-up of a 36k modem, and the startup chimes of Windows 95. Beyond the basement, the nineties sounded like “The Next Episode” by Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg, “Give it Away” by Red Hot Chili Peppers, or “Insomnia” by Faithless, depending on which party I happened to be at.

  I was fourteen when I kissed Hannah during a foam party at our town’s ice rink. I knew her from school. I’d lent her my gloves earlier that night, our breath forming little clouds when we spoke. Later, the DJ dimmed the lights, bathing the rink in a red glow. Our clothes were soaked through from the foam. The DJ announced he was going to play “a few slow songs,” and everyone moved closer to their partners on the ice. That’s when Hannah re-emerged out of the foam. I feel so unsure, as I take your hand and lead you to the dance floor, George Michael was singing. Even then, I thought the song was corny. We slid around together for a while, smiling awkwardly whenever we caught each other’s eyes and immediately looking back down at our skates so as not to lose our balance. I held her firmly by the waist, making sure that my sweaty hands didn’t slip down towards her backside and that I didn’t get too close to her and her breasts. Eventually she nuzzled up to me and gave me a long, wet kiss. I’m still not sure what exactly she got up to with her tongue. All I know is it tasted of chewing gum and felt good.

  Yasmin was at the party too. She was dancing with an older boy, staring deep into his eyes, arms around his neck. I should have known better than to cheat a friend and waste a chance that I’ve been given. I gazed sappily at Hannah. Later, I plucked up the courage to take her hand, and I continued to hold it when we left the party, only letting go when we spotted her mother waiting in the carpark.

  I hadn’t entirely kept the vow I’d made after Laura’s birthday party when I was eight, as over the years I’d learned how to fit in with the various cliques. But I never did make any proper friends. There was no one I’d spend hours on the phone with, no one I could confide in. I kissed Hannah two more times. I kissed other girls too. That’s another 1990s memory: fierce, dimly lit snogging sessions on stained sofas, the sound of thumping basslines in the background. I’m not sure what girls liked about me. Maybe it was that they couldn’t quite figure me out. I wasn’t like the other boys, who strutted about like roosters the minute they saw a girl with her T-shirt knotted to expose a bit of midriff. I was usually standing in a corner watching, wearing my much-too-large leather jacket and saying little, so maybe the girls saw me as an interesting freak.

  I was sixteen when I slept with a girl for the first time. It was at a party. Her name was Mathilda, and she was a year older than me. Wearing a neon T-shirt and red Buffalos, she was drunk, like me. We’d been dancing together, but at some point she disappeared into the mass of sweating bodies. When she reappeared, she walked up to me purposefully and, without saying a word, took my hand and led me to the bedroom of the guy who was throwing the party. She locked the door, kissed me hungrily, undressed herself and then me, and just as I was beginning to understand why people make such a fuss about the whole business, it was over.

  That was 22 November 2000, a couple of days after my birthday. The reason I remember the date isn’t because it was the first time I had sex. It’s because that’s the day Mother died.

  Over the previous year or two, Mother had transformed. It seemed that the older Alina got, the more Mother changed. Unlike me, she’d eventually accepted that life went on without Father.

  One day I was hiding some weed I’d bought from a guy called Gregor when I noticed her standing in front of me. She was holding a laundry basket containing what I could see were Father’s clothes. Putting the basket down, she said in a casual tone, “Most of it is too good to throw away. Take out what you want to keep and I’ll take the rest to the sports hall.”

  The only reason I didn’t kick up a fuss was that my parents had started out in the sports hall themselves. Plenty more refugees had ended up in our town since then, of course, many of them from Kosovo. There was always stuff about them in the newspapers. I knew Father would have approved of his clothes going to them, so I said nothing and picked out three shirts he’d been particularly fond of.

  Mother bought herself a new bed, and Hakim chopped the old one up for firewood. From then on, she slept with just a single-sized duvet. She made herself new dresses and began to use all her wardrobe space, arranging her clothes by colour. Every now and then I’d see her reading on the couch, taking up the full length of it. She opened the windows more often now, bought new curtains, had the flat re-wallpapered and new carpets put down. She started colouring her hair, restoring it to how it had looked before the grey set in.

  Mother’s dressmaking kept us afloat. She went to craft fairs to sell her dresses and look for new ideas, and when business took off, she started teaching at the local community centre, where chatty mothers piled into her sewing courses. She became more sociable. It started with her meeting up with the customers she’d made dresses for. They then introduced her to other people, who in turn invited her to join their book club. They met on the third Thursday of the month, at a different location each time, and swapped book recommendations. This is how she started reading books in German: The Diary of Anne Frank and Kafka’s Metamorphosis. She’d sit on the couch with her book, a blanket round her legs, chuckling, or furrowing her brow, or looking utterly spellbound. She even managed to plough through The Magic Mountain, though she far preferred the Grimm brothers’ fairy tales. She was blooming. Whatever she’d found in the fairy tales began to work its magic on her; I noted with resentment that she had mellowed. Sometimes I’d hear her giggling on the p
hone as if she were a girl again. And she started giving herself little treats: a necklace that had caught her eye, a spa treatment in town. When I came home from school, she’d tell me about her morning in the café, and who she’d bumped into there, or about the old man she’d met while she was out walking who had mistaken her for his daughter. She was bursting with energy. She’d skip around the flat with Alina, just like she used to do with me many years ago. The soft glow returned to her cheeks. She went to my sister’s school concerts and to parents’ evenings. To Hakim’s delight, she bought a children’s violin and paid a music student to give Alina lessons. She asked me whether I’d like to take up a hobby too, martial arts maybe, or join a club. I refused.

  She’d decided, at the age of forty-one, to start a new life, and she refused to let her son’s mistrust put her off. Maybe I was envious of her ability to start again. But mostly I felt she had no right to be happy without her husband.

  She made the biggest break with the past in early 1999, when she took an integration course to become a German citizen. She already met all the other requirements for citizenship. She’d been living in Germany for sixteen years. Both her children had been born here, both were at school. A special transitional law applied to my sister, who’d been born in 1992; Mother had been able to have Alina naturalised when she was just two. Hakim had sorted out citizenship for himself and Yasmin long ago, so Mother was doing it for my sake as much as her own.

  I didn’t want to be German. Ridiculous, really, seeing as I’d been born here and had never once left the country. But I’d been listening to Arabic music for years. I revered a culture I barely knew. I felt Lebanese. What would Father say if he knew Mother was forcing me to become German? Would he stop her? I wanted to have the same citizenship as him. I didn’t care that it was a formality, a change in passport I’d appreciate when I was older, according to Mother. I saw it as my duty to resist, because I was sure that was what Father would have done. But Mother gave me no say in the matter. I began to hate her, not just because she forced German citizenship on me, but also because I saw her decision as a betrayal. As far as I was concerned, it was a blatant attempt to distance herself from her husband as much as possible. By becoming German. By casting off her national identity. That was something he’d never have done.

  Needless to say, she passed the test, and when she arrived home, beaming, with the certificate in her hand and a sense of liberation I could barely fathom, I stomped out of the flat.

  We had a huge row that day, 22 November. What torments me now is that it was over something really trivial. If only I’d been a bit more understanding. Would it have killed me? It was just a party, and on a Wednesday. Only two more days till the weekend, when there’d be another party anyway. There was always a party going on somewhere, and besides, weeknight parties were never as legendary as the Friday-night ones. But I’d decided that Mother, by making me take German citizenship, had forfeited her right to tell me what to do.

  “You’re not going to the party,” she’d said.

  “Yes I am.”

  “Samir.” Her eyes impatient but controlled. “You know I can’t cancel my sewing course. And I can’t take Alina with me.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because it finishes late and she has school tomorrow. As do you, by the way.”

  “So?”

  “So she’s your sister, Samir. All I’m asking is for you to spend one evening at home with her.”

  I looked over at Alina, who was lying sprawled on the floor on her stomach, flicking through a book.

  “Why don’t you ask Nicole?”

  “I already did. She can’t.”

  “Ask Hakim, then.”

  She took a deep breath. I wanted to see her explode, but her voice was quiet.

  “You know he has to work.”

  She was right, I did know that. The joinery where Hakim worked had grown over the years and landed some major contracts, so he’d been working nights over the past few weeks, training a new guy called Hassan. Hakim was on the night shift tonight.

  “Samir.” She tried to smile. She didn’t want to let on how much I was testing her patience, because she knew I would’ve seen it as a minor victory. This was one of the little games we played. “Alina would be so thrilled if you spent an evening with her. Come on, you’re her big brother.”

  “I can’t,” I said. “Everyone’s going to be at the party.” I wanted to get back at her, that was part of it. But I also just didn’t like spending time with Alina. Maybe it was the age gap, and the fact that, to my mind, we had nothing in common. She was a sweet kid, well behaved, helped Mother around the house, loved school, and was always bringing friends back to the flat. And she’d been diligently practising the violin. So there was really no reason not to adore my sister. But she made me uncomfortable. Sometimes, as I watched her drawing in her workbook with her coloured pencils, I’d look for traces of our father in her face. She looked more like him than I did. She had his black hair, and her face was rounder and friendly—a pretty girl, especially when she smiled. Because of these resemblances, I found it all the more disconcerting that she never showed any signs of missing him. She simply had no memory of him holding her and humming in her ear until she fell asleep in his arms. She seemed to have forgotten he’d ever existed. Sometimes she’d grab my hand and start chattering about what she’d learned in school that day, how she’d gathered chestnuts and used them to help her do her sums. I never took in much of what she said. I’d catch myself trying desperately to see the world through her eyes, to see if there was any trace of sadness or disappointment in them. But I saw nothing. She enjoyed a carefree childhood under the watchful eyes of our transformed mother and Hakim, who worshipped her and was convinced she had a glittering career as a violinist ahead of her.

  What I didn’t know was that Mother had a doctor’s appointment at five o’clock. For an MRI. A few weeks previously, she’d had mild symptoms of facial paralysis. For a couple of hours, she’d had only partial sensation on the left side of her face. There was no need to worry, the doctor had assured her; it was probably psychosomatic, a trapped nerve caused by stress, though she insisted she hadn’t felt so well in years. And the symptoms had disappeared that same evening and never returned. But she’d been suffering from a stiff neck and headaches for a while. “Better safe than sorry,” the doctor had said and referred her to a specialist. She planned to drive straight from the hospital to her sewing course in the community centre. As she wouldn’t be home until late, she needed someone to keep an eye on Alina and make sure she went to bed.

  Mother rubbed her neck and tried again. I could see she was really trying not to lose her temper.

  “Can’t you do it as a favour to me?”

  “To you?”

  “Would that really be so hard?”

  “Let’s just say it’s not exactly your most compelling argument.”

  Her voice remained calm.

  “Samir, I know you can’t stand me right now. But you should think about how much slack I’ve cut you over the last while. Your grades are abysmal, all you do is party, you smoke weed …”

  “I …”

  “Please …” She stretched her palm out towards me. “I’m not as stupid as you think. Do what you like, it’s your life, but it would be nice if you could help me out just this once.”

  “So you’re OK with me smoking weed?”

  “I’m OK with you testing boundaries.”

  “What boundaries?”

  “The boundaries that exist whenever people live together under one roof, Samir.”

  “I’m going to the party.”

  “And I’d like you to stay at home with Alina.”

  “I’m going to the party.”

  “Alina would like you to stay at home too.”

  “I’m going to the party.”

  “Fine, don’t
listen to me. But what do you think your father would say?”

  This was my weak point. She knew it, and she stuck her finger deep into the wound. I’m afraid I didn’t have her level of self-control.

  “Father? You weren’t thinking of him when you turned us into Germans behind his back. What if he comes home one day?”

  “Comes home?” Her voice was raised now too, and her hand was shaking. “Samir, it’s been eight years since Brahim disappeared.”

  “So?”

  “So we’ll never see him again. When are you going to get that through your head?”

  “Like you did?” I snarled. “Do you want me to dye my hair and read shitty books with a bunch of fucking idiots?”

  Her eyes widened.

  “Go to your room,” she snapped.

  I really wanted to see her lose it. I wanted to make her suffer. I couldn’t take it anymore, watching her breeze around the flat, laughing and daydreaming, while I was doing everything I could to keep Father’s memory alive. Otherwise we’d have nothing left to remind us that we were Lebanese.

  “Do you really think changing the wallpaper and hanging a few new curtains will get rid of him?”

  “Stop.” She rubbed her neck again and grimaced in pain.

  “I don’t care what you do, I’m not going to forget him just because you want me to!” I was spitting venom.

  “OK, Samir,” she said, her eyes narrowed as if I were giving her a headache, her voice full of disappointment. “I’ll find someone else for Alina.”

  I didn’t want her to give up. I wanted to fight, rub her nose in all her wrongdoings, hurt her.

  “No wonder he left you,” I screamed. “No wonder he couldn’t stand it anymore.” I’d whipped myself up into a rage. I knew I’d gone too far, but I couldn’t stop. My words landed like arrows all over her body. I could see her wince. “I wish he’d taken me with him. I don’t care where he is now, I wish I was there and not here. If only you’d left instead of him.”