The Storyteller

by Pierre Jarawan

  “So you’ve showed up here hoping I can help.” Aziz cracks an oily smile, revealing a set of crooked teeth. “Let’s see what I can do.”

  “How do you know my father? If you know him, that is?”

  Aziz gives a sluggish nod, as if the answer’s obvious, as if it’s a stupid question. Listening to him talk, watching him move, I get the same feeling I had yesterday in Grandmother’s garden. A vague sense of déjà vu. This is the first time I’ve met this man, yet I feel as if I know him.

  “I used to work with your father.”

  “In a nightclub?”

  Aziz bursts out laughing, his belly wobbling like a bowl of jelly.

  “This place is only eight years old. I never had anything to do with clubs before that. We worked together in a hotel. The Carlton.”

  “The one on the Corniche?”

  “There was only one Carlton in Lebanon.”

  “So you were colleagues?”

  “That’s what I just said.”

  My creeping suspicion is becoming a certainty. I stare at him in amazement.

  “Me and him, we didn’t have that much to do with each other.” He opens a little metal case, takes out a cigar, cuts the end off, and lights up. “Brahim dealt with the guests: in the restaurant, by the pool, at weddings. Always on the front line.”

  He purses his lips and releases little rings of cigar smoke.

  “Did you work on the front line too?”

  He snorts.

  “You must be joking. I generally helped out in the kitchen or cleaned rooms once we were sure the guests had left the building. I was never the best-looking guy, not even back then, and our manager was a bit … difficult.”

  “How do you mean?”

  Aziz waves dismissively.

  “It’s ancient history. I haven’t thought about it in years.”

  “I’d like to hear about it, though. If you don’t mind.”

  He examines me suspiciously, his eyes becoming even narrower.

  “His surname was Abdallah. He wasn’t your typical hotel manager.”

  “Why not?”

  “Have you ever been personally welcomed by the manager when you’ve arrived at a hotel?”

  I shake my head.

  “Well, it happens in a lot of hotels. The manager gets a call from reception telling him that new guests have arrived. So he goes into the foyer, shakes their hands, wishes them a pleasant stay. They tend to be slick operators, the kind of guys who could charm the birds out of the trees. Good talkers, well dressed, real ass-kissers.”

  “What about Abdallah?”

  “Abdallah wasn’t like that at all. The entire left side of his face was covered in burns. Don’t know what happened to him. In the wrong place when a grenade was thrown, I guess. Anyway, he was always holed up in his office—he only ever came out to threaten us, to tell us we were too slow, too dirty, too fat, too lazy. He’d dock our pay whenever he felt like it and then claim the guests had complained about their food or the state of their rooms. ‘You’re no better than the filth you clean up.’ That was one of his favourite sayings. He treated us like slaves.” Aziz looks me in the eye. “Your father was the only one he left alone. He was the one who welcomed new guests, shook their hands. ‘Our manager, Mr. Abdallah, sends his apologies. He would have liked to welcome you himself, but he’s in an important meeting. If there’s anything I can do for you, please let me know.’ Good-looking guy, your father. People liked him. As I said, we didn’t have that much to do with each other. Different shifts, different interests. But Brahim was a happy-go-lucky kind of guy. Everything was a game to him. He got more tips than anyone else. He was charming, well-spoken, knew what the guests wanted before they knew it themselves. The minute their glass was empty, Brahim would be standing behind them with the right wine. He had them wrapped around his little finger. Excellent businessman.”

  “My father? Really?” I’d never thought of him as a businessman. The only hint of business acumen I ever saw was when he tried to haggle with the shop assistants when we were out buying groceries.

  “You and your father. You didn’t know each other very well, did you?”

  “I’m not sure anyone really knew him,” I say.

  “The people who stayed at the Carlton were pretty loaded. Most of them came from the Gulf States, money was no object. But they were incredibly bored by their wealth. Brahim knew how to use that boredom to his advantage.”

  “How?”

  “By making them feel like they were caught up in a big adventure. The main characters in an incredible story, born under a lucky star. If he saw one of them standing alone in the corridor for even a second, he’d sidle up and ask if he could do anything for them, if they needed anything. ‘I bet you like whisky,’ he’d say. To which they’d usually answer, ‘My God, it’s eleven in the morning, do I look like an alcoholic?’ and try to send him on his way. But then Brahim would say, ‘I don’t mean right now.’ He’d move a bit closer and lower his voice.” Aziz leans his massive body across the desk and brings his face up to mine. “‘I mean in general. You look like someone who appreciates a good whisky. We both know it’s completely overpriced here in the hotel. The usual brands—Copper Fox, Baker’s, Blanton’s—I mean, the whisky’s fine, but it’s nothing special. I know it’s not about the money for you, but let’s be honest: you don’t like people taking advantage, do you? Of an honest man like you?’ He had their attention then. Brahim was able to speak these people’s language. ‘But I can get you the best whisky in town. You’ve never had a whisky like it. Incredibly rare—priceless, in fact. But I can get you a whole bottle for five hundred dollars.’ The guests would get wary then, start to suspect he might be trying to pull a fast one. So what did your father do? He banished all their doubts with a story. A story so absurd it could only be true in a city as crazy as Beirut at that time. ‘In the east,’ he’d murmur, ‘there’s an old cellar. Hidden within the Phoenician city walls. The entrance is blocked by nondescript metal fencing. You’d never notice it if you didn’t know it was there. Behind the fence there’s a long passage leading to a labyrinth of old escape tunnels dug thousands of years ago. You won’t find this forgotten labyrinth on a map, though. Nobody really knows where all these tunnels lead; there’s just too many of them. If you don’t know your way around down there, you can forget it—you’ll never get out. Have you heard of the Oxford family?’ Needless to say, the guests would shake their heads, so then Brahim would say, ‘The Oxfords came to Beirut in the late 1930s. Before independence. The grandfather was a renowned American archaeologist, became rich and famous after he dug up dinosaur bones in Argentina. He came to Beirut to examine Phoenician burial sites. During one of his expeditions into the underground labyrinth, he stumbled upon a kind of vault at the end of a tunnel. A big cellar full of old casks. Several hundred of them, by all accounts. After some investigation, he realised they hadn’t been stored down there by the Phoenicians—that would have made them more than a thousand years old. No, there’s a way of estimating the age of these things, and he discovered that the casks had been down there for about a hundred years. And that could only mean one thing: that the Ottomans had hidden them there when they occupied Beirut. As you know, Lebanon was under Ottoman rule until 1860. Anyway, when old Mr. Oxford took a look inside the casks, he could hardly believe his eyes.’ At that point, Brahim would pause and whisper, ‘Whisky. More than a hundred years old.’”

  Sinan Aziz roars laughing again and his stomach bumps against the table, causing it to shake precariously.

  “Imagine!” he says. He laughs even louder and bangs on the table with the palm of his hand. “Ottoman whisky! Anyone with an ounce of sense would have dragged your father by the ear into Mr. Abdallah’s office. But these guys were so bored, so seduced by the idea of getting their hands on something really rare and special that they believed his ridiculous bullshit
.”

  I can’t say I blame the tourists. Father could certainly spin a yarn. No doubt they’d have thrown themselves out of a tenth-floor window if his story had demanded it.

  “So what happened then?”

  “That’s when Brahim needed an accomplice. He’d tell the guests he needed them to keep a lookout while he went off to west Beirut to get the whisky from a middleman. He’d give them a pair of binoculars and a radio, and tell them to warn him if they spotted any roadblocks or snipers on the roofs. ‘How are we supposed to know if there are snipers around?’ the guests would ask. Brahim would send them off up onto the roof with me or another colleague, and we’d make sure they were facing east, towards the city. Of course, we could only do that when we were sure there were no snipers on our roof. Meanwhile your father would amble out of the hotel, cross the street to the little wooden huts on the Corniche, and buy a bottle of whisky for three dollars. You should’ve seen it, those guys in their fancy white suits. They thought they were players in some cloak-and-dagger operation, standing around on the roof while their wives were getting hammered by the pool. They’d radio your father, ‘All clear, no road blocks in sight,’ and he’d radio back, ‘Good. Remain vigilant, I’m nearly at the Green Line.’ And all the time he’d be standing right in front of the hotel, eating an ice cream.”

  “And he never got caught?”

  Aziz shook his head admiringly.

  “The whisky was vile stuff. Brahim just poured it into old brown bottles, no label, nothing. I don’t know if the guests ever tried it, their Ottoman whisky. They probably thought it was too precious to drink. And if they did try it, I’m sure they convinced themselves that it was this special Ottoman note that gave the whisky its distinctive flavour.”

  I have to smile. If Father had one talent, it was storytelling. In a painful kind of way, it’s wonderful to hear that he’d always been a master of the art.

  “If anyone had got wind of it, we’d all have been in deep shit,” Aziz says. “Abdallah would’ve killed us. Had us lined us up against the wall and shot. But no one ever did find out. Partly because Brahim never set off straight away to get the whisky. He’d always wait two or three days, depending on how long the guests were staying. He’d tell them it took a while because his middlemen couldn’t go down into the secret passages whenever they felt like it, they had to wait until the coast was clear. Having to wait convinced these guys they were getting their hands on something really special.”

  “So what did he do with the money?”

  Aziz grins again, and I notice a gold tooth glinting in his mouth.

  “He blew it all on us. Maybe he was trying to keep us sweet, I don’t know. Brahim was the only one who got on with Abdallah. It made the rest of us a bit suspicious. We never knew how much we could tell your father. But then there was a general atmosphere of mistrust during the civil war. You know the Lebanese. We’re open and friendly. But not during the war. You didn’t know who you could trust, so you had to be careful. Religion wasn’t a major issue in the hotel. Among the employees, I mean. Religion was used by the militiamen as an excuse to butcher each other. Meanwhile, among the civilian population, Christians, Muslims, and Druze were generally getting along fine, just as they always had. But you always had the sense that things could get ugly very easily. A slip of the tongue, a minor car accident, an argument, and you wouldn’t be a neighbour anymore, you’d be the Muslim, the Christian, the Druze, and people would be quick to hurl accusations around. But Brahim didn’t care what religion we were. He was generous, bought us all drinks. I think he just liked a good knees-up, really.”

  That’s comforting to hear too. It sounds like the man I knew. Father wasn’t fake, he didn’t lie to us.

  “I remember this one evening,” Aziz says, scratching the back of his head and looking at the wall above my head, as if he’s just spotted a portal leading him back to that evening. “The reason I remember it so well is that I only went out with your father twice. We rarely worked the same shifts. I heard about most of his exploits from others. But this one time, we were in a disco. Brahim paid for all the drinks, and we were pissing ourselves laughing at a Saudi he’d scammed out of five hundred dollars with his whisky racket. We’d just been to the theatre. The play we’d seen was the talk of Beirut. In fact, the entire country was up in arms about it. It later became famous throughout the Arab world and ran in Beirut for years. One matinee performance and one in the evening. Constantly sold out. It premiered in 1980 at Cinéma Jeanne d’Arc in Hamra, in west Beirut, where they sometimes put on plays. Tickets were like gold dust. The waiting list was six to eight months. But we were determined to see it.”

  “Why was there so much hype about it?”

  “It was by Ziad Rahbani, who was a star even before he wrote it. The son of Fairuz, the singer—you know Fairuz. But Rahbani wasn’t famous just because of her. He was multitalented in his own right: an author, pianist, columnist—there was nothing the man couldn’t do. But he surpassed himself with Film Ameriki Tawil.”

  I catch Nabil nodding out of the corner of my eye and turn around.

  “You saw it too?”

  “Oh yes,” Nabil says. “Everyone saw Film Ameriki Tawil. It was the sole topic of conversation at the time, so you had to see it if you wanted to join in.”

  Aziz looks at me and points at Nabil. Told you, he seems to be saying.

  “So why was it the talk of the town?”

  “It’s set in a lunatic asylum,” Aziz says, “sort of inspired by One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. You could say it’s a metaphor for the civil war. Religious paranoiacs and neurotics everywhere. An outrageous comedy, took the piss out of everyone and everything. Showed how absurd the war was. Can you imagine what it was like? People making their way through Beirut; burning buildings and gunfire on some streets, totally quiet on other streets. It’s dangerous to be out and about, but no one wants to miss out. So everyone’s flocking to Cinéma Jeanne d’Arc to see a play about a war they’ve just walked through.”

  “The best thing about it was the characters,” Nabil says. “They were just like us. One character, Hani, lives in constant fear of being stopped by the militias. So he runs around the ward showing people his ID and refusing to go away until they give him permission to move on. Another character … what was he called again?”

  “Abed?” Aziz suggests.

  “Abed, that’s it. Abed is a writer who wants to write a book about the civil war. He wants to reveal the truth about the war, about the conspiracies behind it, but he never figures out the truth, so he can never start his book.”

  “The play is full of characters like that, characters that everyone recognised.” Aziz smiles. “Another one is terrified of Muslims, so he refuses to talk to strangers until they tell him what religion they are. Like I said, tickets were like gold dust, but somehow Brahim managed to get his hands on some. There were four of us: me, him, and two other colleagues. All in our best suits. We split our sides laughing, it was the best evening of my life. Afterwards we were pretty hyper, first in the disco, then in the taxi on the way back to the hotel. We jabbered about the play non-stop, but Brahim … I don’t know … He was unusually quiet, deep in thought.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. I wanted to include him, so I said, ‘Brahim, what was your favourite bit?’ And he looks at me and says, ‘The beginning.’ ‘The beginning?’ I ask. ‘You mean the first dialogue?’ ‘No,’ he says. ‘I mean the beginning. When the announcer takes the stage.’ I look at him and ask, ‘Why was that the best part?’ And he replies, ‘The play is full of truth, but the truest bit is right at the start.’ Brahim used to speak in riddles sometimes. For some reason the very start got him thinking.”

  “What happens at the start?”

  “Not much,” says Nabil. “The play opens with the sound of bombs going off and the Lebanese anthem playing. An announcer comes on and
says, ‘It is the year 1980 or 1979, but it could just as well be 1978.’ That’s all he says. That’s all he needs to say. Everyone knew what he meant: the war had reached a stalemate. It was Rahbani saying that the war was going to drag on for at least another ten years, that’s how we interpreted it. He turned out to be right.”

  “It made an impression on all of us, but it seemed to affect Brahim the most,” Aziz says. “He was quiet for the rest of night, sat in the corner as we were playing cards, lost every hand.”

  I prick up my ears.

  “Cards?”

  “Yeah, we played a game in my room that night. We had a regular cards night, but your father was there only that one time. No wonder he lost—I was basically unbeatable.” Aziz grins again. “This nightclub has been my job for the past eight years. It’s honest work. Before that, I was a professional gambler, spent five days a week in the casino. One day eight years ago, I made a fortune. When I woke up the next morning, it hit me: that’s it, I’ll never need to work again. But I’m not the kind of guy who can sit around on his ass all day. So I opened this nightclub, and I’ve been here ever since,” he says, gesturing around him with both arms.

  My eyes are drawn to a row of photos on the wall behind Aziz’s head. One shows him standing in front of the bar with his arms around two beautiful blonde women. He’s still talking, but I’m barely listening. In this dark office, it dawns on me.

  Rhino Night Club. We had a regular cards night … I was basically unbeatable.

  I stare at him as he keeps on talking. My temples are throbbing. Aziz’s voice is far away, barely audible. I feel weightless; the realisation is so powerful that it yanks me back to my childhood. So many images flashing past: Father sitting on the edge of my bed, his eyes sparkling, telling a story in a soft voice.

  “The rhinoceros—it’s you!” I blurt.

  Aziz stiffens.

  “What did you say?”

  “I know who you are,” I say, “You’re the rhinoceros who’s unbeatable at cards.”