MISCHA HILLER
Sabra Zoo
TELEGRAM
For my sons
This eBook edition published 2011
First print edition published 2010 by Telegram
eISBN: 978-1-84659-102-0
Copyright © Mischa Hiller, 2010 and 2011
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1
I sat in the front passenger seat of the yellow 1966 Mercedes, clinging to the leather strap. Samir was driving too fast through the potholed streets of Sabra refugee camp, like he was still driving PLO bigwigs around. I clung to the strap with both hands, slithering across the worn leather seat as we went round a corner, my stomach punishing me for the amount I’d drunk the night before. I looked out of the window to fight the nausea, trying to concentrate on the passing scenery. I was never sure when the transition from city to camp happened, whether there was some recognised boundary. I suppose the buildings became smaller, less well built, their breeze-block walls unplastered. There was no tarmac on the road and there was a lot more corrugated iron. This wasn’t a refugee camp in the sense of tents and blankets issued to displaced people, it was more a sprawling shanty town built up over the years on the outskirts of the city. Many of the people in the camp were born there, attended a UN-run school there, worked and got married there. Off the main road the buildings became single storey and the streets grew narrower until they were just a network of alleys with small one- and two-room houses. Children jumped out of the path of the Mercedes as it came to a sliding stop in front of the Red Crescent Hospital, easily the tallest building around. I waited for the dust and my stomach to settle as Samir checked himself in the rear-view mirror, smoothing his moustache with his fingers then running them through his thick hair. He was clean shaven and well turned out. He gave me an appraising look.
‘Ivan, my friend, you’ll never lose your virginity looking like a gypsy,’ he said.
I shrugged inside my denim jacket and pulled at a frayed rip on my jeans. ‘I knew it was a mistake to confide in you,’ I said.
He smiled. ‘Alcohol loosens the tongues of men and, thank God, the morals of women.’ He lit a Marlboro as I stepped out of the car. ‘I’ll see you later, yes?’ he asked, revving the engine unnecessarily.
‘I’ll stop by the café,’ I said.
No sooner had I closed the door than Samir let out the clutch and fishtailed down the dirt road. I smiled to see him being cursed by the head-scarfed women left in his dusty wake. They glared at me, complicit through association, and I quickly entered the hospital building. Crossing the lobby, I passed a refugee family that looked like they were camped there, complete with foam mattresses and a small paraffin stove. Refugees within a refugee camp. I ran up the stairs to the orthopaedic ward but I had to pause for breath on the second floor, my lungs sore, thinking I ought to be in better shape at eighteen, that I should cut out the cigarettes. It was 8.30 in the morning and I was just in time to see the child-sized figure of Dr Asha Patel enter the ward. I followed her in, still panting from my climb.
‘Ah, Ivan,’ she smiled, ‘just in time for rounds.’
Eli, the Norwegian physiotherapist who was accompanying Asha, winked at me: she’d been there the previous night, although she herself had been restrained in her drinking. I winked back. Perhaps I hadn’t made such a fool of myself after all. She looked fresh and professional in her white scrubs and braided hair. I was conscious of my own war-torn jeans and grubby trainers. At least I’d managed to find a clean T-shirt that morning. Eli wasn’t pretty, not in the way that Samir would think, but there was something about her, the way she held herself, the frankness of her gaze. Several times I’d caught sight of her across a room, laughing or smiling, and I knew she was beautiful. In the few days I’d known her, I’d never seen her wear make-up, although she was partial to wearing ribbons in her hair.
‘Are you two ready?’ Asha asked, raising her black eyebrows at me in mock seriousness. She smiled again and my eyes were drawn to her perfectly formed white teeth; it happened every time she smiled, which she did a lot.
We stopped by the bed of an unconscious man who had a bloody bandage covering the stump where his right leg used to be. His family were standing around him, towering over Asha expectantly.
Asha prodded at his bandage. ‘Tell them I had to remove his leg …’
I waited, hoping to be able to interpret something more than the obvious.
‘Tell them his leg was too damaged by the shrapnel to be saved, but that with the right prosthetic and treatment from Eli he’ll be walking in several weeks.’
She waited as I struggled for the Arabic for ‘prosthetic’. I settled for ‘false leg’ instead, although God knows I’d had to say it often enough that summer for it to be in my top ten most used words.
Asha continued, ‘Because the amputation was beneath the knee he will have complete flexibility in the leg, so he was lucky in that respect.’
She smiled at the family as I translated. I asked if they had questions. The man’s wife started to cry and a male relative thanked Asha, calling her ‘Doctora’. She was renowned in the camp, her tireless efforts to patch people up rewarded with enormous respect by men who wouldn’t have let their own sisters become doctors but would no doubt have begged to be operated on by this small Indian woman if they’d been unfortunate enough to need it.
‘This boy is a sad case,’ Asha said in her perfect, easy-on-the-ear English, stopping at the bed of a dark-haired kid of about twelve or thirteen, about the same age my brother Karam would have been if he was still alive. He had the same dark look about him, the same eyes, eyebrows that almost met in the middle and thick hair. He was having his dressing changed by a nurse and his black eyes flashed in anger or pain. ‘His foot was badly damaged although Dr Angstrom and I managed to save it,’ said Asha. A woman, maybe the boy’s mother, sat by his bed, stroking his dark hair. I felt queasy as the nurse irrigated the wound with saline, running gauze through a hole in one side of his foot and out of the other. The boy moaned. Asha held his bony hand and asked the nurse how much pethidine he was on.
‘More than he should be,’ the nurse replied, another foreign volunteer, Scandinavian of some sort, I didn’t know and it wasn’t the time to inquire, although Samir would have had the name of her hotel by now, would have arranged to meet her later and take her on a tour of recent bomb sites. Asha was talking to me.
‘Tell his aunt that he will need three weeks in hospital and then physiotherapy, to make sure he walks properly again.’
I translated, the Arabic for ‘physiotherapy’ eluding me as the sight of the wound and last night’s vodka conspired to make me inarticulate. Luckily, the boy’s aunt kicked in as I floundered, effusively thanking Doctora Asha.
‘She said thank you,’ was the best I could do; my stomach had become detached from the rest of my insides and my hands felt clammy.
‘Maybe Ivan needs to lie down,’ Eli said.
I ignored the jibe and was relieved to see the nurse start to dress the terrible wound. I tried to focus on the fact that the boy was now addressing me.
‘Have you ever seen a wound like this?’ he said, pointing at his foot. He tried to shift himself up the bed using arms that didn’t look strong enough to support even his light weight.
‘You’re very brave,’ I said. ‘How did it happen?’
‘We went to play football and I kicked a tin off the pitch. At le
ast I thought it was a tin. My uncle, God rest his soul, said it was a cluster bomb.’
The boy’s aunt was making her feelings about the use of cluster bombs very clear, using some strong language unusual for Palestinian women of her age. It occurred to me, not for the first time that summer, that war was liberating in many unexpected ways.
‘Did you watch the World Cup?’ I asked the boy, even though it was two months ago.
‘Yeah, Paolo Rossi was the best, don’t you think?’
‘He sure was,’ I said, vaguely recalling that Italy had won. ‘My name is Ivan. I’ll see you again soon.’
‘What sort of name is Ifan?’ he asked; excusable since there is no letter ‘v’ in the Arabic alphabet.
‘It’s Russian,’ I told him.
He looked at me with more interest. ‘Are you Russian?’
‘No.’ I didn’t elaborate on my Danish and Palestinian roots.
‘I’m Youssef,’ the boy said. He extended his hand to me in a formal gesture that was touching. His skin was paper dry and his grip weak. It was like shaking the hand of a dusty skeleton in a school laboratory.
We moved on, past the maimed and the critically ill, only occasionally stopping at someone newly operated on; most people on the ward were leftovers from the violence of the summer siege of Beirut, too ill to be discharged. Most had already been told (some by me) that they wouldn’t be playing football or the piano again.
We stopped by the bed of an elderly man who had been in various hospitals since June. He was nicknamed Donkey Man by the staff because he’d broken his leg falling off a donkey, although he swore blind that he was wounded fighting in the south of Lebanon. Due to his age and wartime diet his leg was taking months to heal. The hospital was keen to discharge him but he had nowhere to go. His family had stopped visiting after the first week; no one knew why. Perhaps they’d suffered enough of his fanciful stories, although it was more likely they’d gone back south and hadn’t been able to return. I suspected Donkey Man enjoyed the bed baths given by the nurses too much, and leaving would deprive him of this one pleasure.
‘How are we feeling today?’ Asha asked, knocking on his yellowing cast for clues.
‘When will I be washed by the blonde nurse?’ Donkey Man replied, not waiting for the translation.
‘He’s feeling fine, never felt better,’ I said. I was keen to get some breakfast since my nausea had passed.
‘Tell him the cast is coming off in a couple of days,’ said Asha.
Asha and I went to the makeshift kitchen in the basement, leaving Eli to coax a young girl into using a newly fitted artificial leg. People were queuing up for hard-boiled eggs, sweet tea and hot flat bread. We found a seat on a box of medical supplies donated by Christian Aid and I cracked my egg on my bony knee.
‘You don’t look well,’ Asha said. ‘Are you eating properly?’ This was rich coming from her. Dark rings under her eyes offset the paleness of her brown skin. Her black hair had lost the lustre it had when she’d first arrived in the city. I knew that she hadn’t left the hospital in three days; the summer for her had been a constant run of traumatic amputations, relief coming only in the form of the odd dislocation or broken bone.
‘I’m fine, Mother,’ I said, examining the purple yolk of my extra-hard egg. I was reluctant to tell her that I’d spent an alcohol-fuelled evening with some of the other foreign volunteers and friends in my parents’ apartment, my parents having left in the PLO exodus three days before. I suspected she would disapprove of such goings-on under the circumstances. Or perhaps she would understand that it was how some of her colleagues coped and would be sympathetic, although she herself never drank and avoided the expatriate crowd. She referred to them as tourists.
I first met Asha in a makeshift hospital in an office block in the Hamra district, a relatively well-heeled part of west Beirut, less prone to attracting incoming ordnance, which was why the hospital was housed there. It was July, the siege was settling nicely into a routine that people could understand: the water had been cut off, the electricity had died, the city had been pounded with big bombs, peppered with small, a ceasefire was announced and then it started all over again. Medical volunteers began to arrive from all over the world, although the Scandinavians were heavily represented. I’d been persuaded by Asha, whom I’d met through friends of my parents, to interpret for the volunteer medics crazy enough to come to this hellhole. I’d gone to meet her at the hospital but before I even had time to get my bearings a group of armed men had stormed the emergency room carrying a badly burnt comrade, bits of smoking clothes and skin falling from him. Waving their AK-47S around and shouting, they’d demanded immediate treatment. Everyone had frozen but Asha had stepped forward, her small frame blocking the men’s way.
‘Tell them’, she said, keeping her eye squarely on the men as I cowered behind her, ‘that no one comes into my emergency room with weapons.’
Without thinking, I addressed the insane-looking bunch, my voice wavering; they looked as if they hadn’t had much sleep in the last week. There was a moment’s silence as they looked at us, deciding whether to shoot the small foreign doctor and the sweaty kid trying to hide behind her, but then they backed away, standing outside while Asha and the others treated the injured man. Later I was given the unwanted task of telling them that their comrade was in a bad way and was unlikely to survive. The fighters, slumped in their jeep and chain-smoking, told me to apologise to the good Doctora on their behalf, to explain that they were under a lot of pressure. I went back in to the makeshift emergency room to reassure everybody that they weren’t about to be shot but was sent straight back out by Asha to ask them to donate blood; I soon learnt that this was a standard request for anyone entering the hospital on their own feet. I went back the next day. I felt useful.
Now, as we finished breakfast in the canteen beneath the Sabra camp hospital, my stomach wasn’t coping with my over-boiled egg.
‘Are you coming to my place tonight?’ I asked Asha.
‘Of course,’ she said. I stood up to go but had to leave without saying goodbye; hospital staff and patients’ relatives quickly surrounded her, blocking her from my view.
What Asha didn’t know, and I would never tell her, was that I had to get back to Hamra to courier some forged papers. That was why I’d been asked to stay in the city rather than leave on a ship with my parents. I felt for the reason in my back pocket – my Danish passport, which allowed me relatively easy movement around the city. The war was over and I was parent-free for the first time, with my own apartment. I couldn’t ask for more.
2
I made my way down Hamra Street, heading to Samir’s café before my rendezvous at the forging house. Hamra Street was the main shopping street of west Beirut and bisected the area of the same name. It was only slightly scarred by shelling compared to the southern reaches of west Beirut, where the refugee camps and the multitude of abandoned PLO offices were situated. This was a more affluent west Beirut, where boutiques, cinemas and street cafés occupied the ground floors of large apartment blocks, many empty as the owners had left for Europe or the east of the city. Since the siege had eased, goods were getting in and there were more people on the street, doing more everyday things; I passed a hairdressing salon in which women sat in curlers, and a café where men sat on the pavement outside drinking coffee and smoking narghilehs. Samir’s place – consisting of a food counter and a few Formica tables – was next to the cinema where only a few months ago I’d watched Mad Max with my schoolmates, unaware of our own impending apocalypse. It was a good place to stop if I thought I was being followed, but it was also a good place to eat. Samir was often found there, supervising the making of his ‘special’ falafel mix and blending the secret sauce he served with it himself (he wouldn’t trust anyone else with the formula). He had managed to keep the place open even during the worst of the siege. I usually ate there for nothing when Samir was on the premises. He would greet the regulars and swap the latest rumour
s while casting his eye over any woman that passed the shop front. He had a radar for them.
‘Ivan,’ he called from behind the counter, his neatly pressed clothes protected by an apron, ‘the situation must be improving – the women are starting to look like women again.’
I watched Samir fill flat bread with some wilting salad and freshly fried falafel but stopped him dribbling his secret sauce over the top.
‘He’s no fool, this one,’ said one of the customers, laughing.
‘You won’t be laughing when it’s being sold in every shop across the Middle East,’ Samir said.
This just provoked more laughter and he handed the sandwich to me with a hurt expression. I bit into it hungrily, listening to the banter. It was all about the PLO leaving and what would happen now.
‘So,’ one of them was asking, ‘you think the Israelis will enter the city?’
‘For sure, they’ll want to check for themselves that the PLO has left,’ someone said.
‘Not with the multinationals here. Not with the Americans at the port,’ said another.
‘What, and the multinational force is going to be here for ever? They only came for the evacuation, you idiot.’
And so the discussion went, everyone giving their prediction on when the Western troops would leave. I knew that most of these Lebanese men, Samir among them, had ambivalent feelings about the PLO. Although they may have earnt their money working for them (like Samir, claiming he’d driven Arafat himself) they were also relieved that they had gone. The feeling was that the Palestinians had overstayed their welcome in Lebanon since arriving in 1967, turning parts of it into a permanent home from home. My Timex told me I was going to be late if I didn’t move.
Five minutes from Samir’s place I turned south off Hamra Street onto Rue Descartes, and picking my way past a shoulder-high mountain of rotting garbage entered a 1930s apartment block. An old lady in glasses was checking the mailboxes. She caught sight of me before I got to the stairs.
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