‘Who are you? You don’t live here,’ she said.
‘Just visiting, Auntie. Don’t worry yourself.’
‘Visiting who?’
I took the stairs three at a time to the third floor. I knocked with a pre-arranged tattoo on the door and grinned at the eye that darkened the security peephole. Najwa let me into the apartment and bolted the door behind me. Her once tight-fitting jeans hung from her hips like a denim skirt.
‘You’re late,’ she said in Arabic, limping towards the dining-room table where official papers and rubber stamps lay carefully arranged. My mother once told me that Najwa had spent three months in a Syrian prison and had come out with a limp and a streak of white on one side of her jet-black hair.
‘I’m here now,’ I said.
‘Spending too much time with those foreign nurses?’ she asked, smirking.
I felt my face redden but didn’t answer; smirking women were not something I’d yet learnt to deal with. I knew that she didn’t want to spend more than an hour in the place, as there was a chance it could be raided. Today wasn’t the first time the neighbours had questioned one of us in the lobby. Our story was that we were watering the plants until the owners came back.
She sat back at the table, sticking a passport photo of a young man onto a blank Israeli travel permit. I watched as she impressed the photo with a home-made rubber stamp. It was similar to one of several I had helped to make just a couple of weeks before. They were made from the official stamps on legitimate documents borrowed (or indeed stolen) from sympathetic people who could travel through Israeli lines. The forging operation was originally housed in a windowless basement with a steel door in the south of the city, and was run by another foreign volunteer, a cheery German called Andreas who was rumoured to be an ex-member of the Baader-Meinhof group and who had an artificial left hand. Whatever the truth, in short supply in the fever of a summer war, he’d shown me how to create a rubber stamp from a facsimile and how to remove a signature from a passport using only what could be bought in a stationery shop. Andreas had acquired his rubber-coated left hand after putting together a letter bomb which detonated before it could be posted. Since the PLO evacuation a few days ago, which took Andreas with it (keffiyah and large sunglasses conveniently covering his fair head), the operation had been split up into smaller discrete parts, each occupying a different dwelling across the city. This apartment was one of them. It was unoccupied, its owners having left for France, entrusting the keys to Najwa, whose handbag was weighed down with several sets. It was unclear to me how she remembered which keys opened what door or how indeed she explained having so many on her. She must have told people she was watering a lot of plants.
She gave me three complete forged travel permits. I wrapped and taped them in a sheet of paper then taped the package inside the day’s newspaper with the headline ‘INTERNAL SECURITY FORCES DEPLOYED IN SOUTHERN SUBURBS’, and folded the paper in three.
‘Any new volunteers we should know about?’ Najwa asked, sitting back in her chair and putting her hands behind her head. My eyes were momentarily drawn to the hair under her armpits, which was a different colour from the mainly jet-black hair on her head. She noticed my gaze and folded her arms. I felt like I’d been caught looking down her blouse.
‘There are a couple of new nurses and a new Belgian doctor,’ I replied, studying the criss-cross sticky tape on the windowpanes, designed to stop it shattering into fragments and shredding the occupants in the event of an explosion.
‘Have you got names?’ she asked.
I reluctantly muttered their names, which she wrote down. ‘What are you going to do with those, run them through the PLO super-computer?’ I said. Surprised by my own sarcasm, my face flushed again.
‘This is serious, Ivan, this isn’t a game. Those of us who have remained behind are at risk. Not everyone has a foreign passport to fall back on.’
I wanted to say something about her being able to make one for herself but held my tongue. During the summer I’d talked of burning my Danish passport after similar jibes from people, but my mother had told me not to be stupid. Najwa tried to conceal the effort of getting up from the table and started to gather the stamps and passes together, avoiding my eyes. ‘Let’s meet again in three days, my place,’ she said.
‘What time? I don’t want to be late.’
She gave me a look.
I made my way back onto the street, tensing in the September sun, patting my tatty passport still sitting snug in my hip pocket. I walked the four kilometres to the American University Hospital, where people who could pay went to get better. At the reception I asked for a Dr Ramina and was put through to her on the phone.
‘Hello, it’s George,’ I said, trying to ignore the look of curiosity on the receptionist’s face. ‘I’ve come for my blood test results.’ I found myself talking English with a slight Arabic accent, taking on the less than perfect cadence of Dr Ramina. It was something I did when I spoke to Samir in English, or indeed when I spoke English to a Norwegian. Maybe it was a subconscious need to be accepted.
Dr Ramina’s office was off one side of a laboratory where technicians sat at benches looking through microscopes. Dr Ramina looked middle-aged or just tired – it was difficult to tell in those post-siege days. She had lipstick on her teeth.
‘So, you’ve come for your results, George?’ she said in an unnaturally loud voice. She pretended to inquire about my parents, whom she’d never met, while she dug out a patient’s file from a stack on her desk and made a show of consulting it. I put my newspaper on the desk, next to an identical one, except, I noticed, it wasn’t folded in the same way.
‘Everything looks fine, I think the iron tablets are working. Your red cell count is back to normal.’
‘OK, good,’ I said, standing up. ‘I do feel a lot better.’ I picked up her newspaper from the desk and folded it in three as we walked out to the corridor together. We stood waiting for the lift and I wished she would leave; it wasn’t normal to be standing out here with me, a healthy person, when she had real patients to see. She leant towards me and spoke in a low voice: ‘To be honest, maybe you should have a blood test, you do look anaemic.’
I stepped into the lift and smiled at her as the doors closed.
Later that night I was in what I now called my apartment. I wasn’t sure who it belonged to but it was where my parents had moved after having to evacuate our own apartment earlier in the summer. A group sat round the large coffee table covered in half-empty wine bottles and full ashtrays. It was dark outside but I’d lost track of the time. Samir had brought a couple of Lebanese friends whom I didn’t know. They weren’t drinking but chain-smoked Marlboros. They both had moustaches and one of them was in the process of growing a beard.
Samir was talking over Don McLean on the turntable. ‘Did anyone see the US marines at the port?’ he asked. ‘You need to go and see them, they’re very short.’
‘They’re what?’ asked a Swedish woman whose name I couldn’t remember. She was easily the oldest person there and spoke the least English. I wasn’t sure if we’d been introduced but I thought she was an anaesthetist. She didn’t look comfortable, perched on the end of her chair.
‘Short,’ Samir said, holding his hand up to indicate. ‘Small, like this.’
I had noticed this when I’d followed the departing convoy of PLO fighters to the port, where they’d boarded ships to be dispersed around the Mediterranean. I’d walked alongside them from the municipal stadium where they embarked, saying goodbye to my mother, who was standing in a truck with other wives of cadres along with some trusted comrades to look after them. They’d been dressed in brand-new fatigues and keffiyahs, like everyone else. The fighters triumphantly shot rounds from their AK-47S into the air. Hot bullet casings had stung the side of my head; later Asha told me that many people had come into hospital with head injuries caused by falling bullet shells. She wasn’t pleased at this unnecessary extra work. I’d reached the roadblock a
t the port, where the US marines were stationed, letting through the trucks full of armed PLO fighters in battle dress. They did look short and nervous, but maybe that was because everyone else was standing in trucks. That was when I’d unexpectedly spotted my father, incongruously dressed in fatigues and helmet, sporting an AK-47 and sitting in the front of a truck, next to the driver. He looked awkward and out of place. I’d jumped up onto the running board and tried to give him a hug, but the weapon and helmet got in the way. I was pulled down and my father disappeared through the roadblock. All through the siege I’d hardly seen him. I felt cheated by our wordless and inept farewell.
We drank some more and I made a toast to the short marines, before stopping someone from picking at the deposited wax on an empty Chianti bottle that had been used as a candleholder. I’d been nurturing it all summer, even bringing it with me when we moved to this apartment from our previous home.
‘What about the Italians?’ someone else said. ‘Have you seen their hats?’ It was true that the Italian contingent had worn ridiculous headgear; tall and feathered, they looked like they’d just come from being on parade in front of the Vatican. The war-hardened kids in the camps couldn’t believe it – these guys had come to protect them? Only the French paratroopers looked like a real fighting force. Big, tough-looking men with shaved heads, people wished they’d been there during the siege. Another toast to the Italians was followed by one to the paratroopers. Samir and his teetotal friends started talking about the pros and cons of the different weapons the multinational forces carried.
Bored, I went to the kitchen where Eli and Asha were making something to eat. John, the paediatrician from Scotland, was there. He was popular with the camp inhabitants but some of his colleagues were ambivalent about his presence, even questioning the time I spent interpreting for him in his clinic. I thought it must have something to do with him coming to Beirut on his own rather than through a charity. Najwa had been particularly interested in John when I told her about him. You couldn’t tell who had entered the city, she said; it was more difficult to check people out since the PLO apparatus had been dismantled. Having seen him in his clinic it was difficult to imagine that he was anything other than a doctor but people were always wary of someone they couldn’t easily pigeonhole. He was making a tomato sauce to go with the spaghetti on the stove.
‘Ivan, Dostoyevsky or Tolstoy?’ he asked, as if offering a choice of fruit.
I pretended to mull it over. ‘Dostoyevsky, I think.’ I’d never read Tolstoy.
He nodded and his glasses steamed up under his curly hair. He made Asha laugh, saying, ‘You’re making me hot, baby.’ It was funny because no one else would dare say that to her. I was sick of spaghetti; it was all we had eaten over the summer, along with rice, lentils, tinned tuna and sardines. All the lights went out and a collective groan came from the living room. In the kitchen, lit only by the blue flame on the stove, there was a practised scramble to light candles. I was standing close to Eli.
‘I need your help with the boy, Youssef, the one with the foot injury,’ she said to me. Her eyes flickered in the candlelight. Her braid was undone and her brown hair held back with a band.
‘Of course,’ I said. Helping with Youssef would be a good excuse to spend time with her, although I thought the boy could do with some extra support. ‘I can come down to the hospital tomorrow.’ We swapped smiles.
‘So this is your apartment?’ she asked.
‘It is, since my parents left, although it’s not theirs either, the owners are in London. We only came here in the summer because it was safer during the bombing.’
‘Ivan’s bachelor pad. Better watch yourself, lassie,’ John said.
‘Where are they, your parents?’ she asked.
‘They’ve gone … on a … um, cruise.’
‘A cruise?’
‘Yes. They thought it was time they saw the Mediterranean.’
She couldn’t tell whether her leg was being pulled. Smiling, I headed back to the living room.
The mood was quieter. Don McLean had been silenced by the power cut.
‘Where is your husband?’ one of Samir’s friends asked the anaesthetist, lighting a Marlboro from one already going.
‘He’s with my daughter, at home in Sweden,’ she answered, cradling a glass of wine to her chest.
‘Mother should be with daughter,’ he said smiling, but his lips had thinned.
‘She’s almost a woman now and I will be back with her soon.’ She smiled as if visualising the moment.
‘Haven’t you heard of women’s lib?’ laughed Liv, a black-haired Norwegian who called herself a Trotskyist. I wasn’t sure what that was beyond a love of Trotsky, but the label suited her for some reason. I knew (through listening to my father) that Leninists hated Trotsky but I wasn’t sure why.
‘Why you are coming here?’ asked the man, louder than before. His question was aimed at the wider group but the anaesthetist was taken aback. Her mouth twitched nervously. She and Liv exchanged a look. I hoped Samir would intervene, but he’d disappeared onto the balcony with someone.
‘They’ve come to help us,’ I said, immediately thinking how feeble this sounded.
‘We don’t want their help,’ Marlboro Man said, gesturing to the now silent gathering with his burning cigarette. ‘Foreigners have created the problems here, more of them will not make it better. We Arabs can solve our own problems.’
‘I don’t remember’, Samir said in Arabic, as he stepped in from the balcony, ‘seeing any Arabs here when we needed their help. Where were your fucking Arabs when we were being bombed by F-16S and shelled by gunboats?’
Marlboro Man’s companion, the one trying to grow the beard, addressed Samir in Arabic. ‘You are trying to be Western, Samir, listening to this shit,’ pointing at the records, ‘drinking alcohol, spending time with decadent Western women. You are a blasphemer. You should be a true Muslim.’
I started to laugh, but saw that the man’s hands were shaking and that neither he nor his companion was laughing. Samir, though, was smiling at this outburst. I picked up someone’s packet of Kent from the table but didn’t think I could light one without making a hash of it. This wasn’t how I’d envisaged the evening.
‘Maybe your friends should leave’, I said to Samir in Arabic, not looking at the men, ‘if they don’t feel comfortable with our guests.’
‘They are just going, I think,’ Samir said, still smiling, moving towards them. Asha entered the room carrying a pan of spaghetti, trailing steam. As the two men stood up I saw a flash of candle-lit blue steel under Marlboro Man’s jacket. I glanced at the housing for the rolling shutter above the balcony door, where I’d hidden my own ancient Soviet-made Tokarev 9mm automatic on the last day of the PLO evacuation.
Asha put the pan on the table and was followed into the room by Eli and John, carrying plates and cutlery. The two men pushed by them into the hall, followed by Samir.
‘Let’s eat,’ said Asha, as Eli handed out plates, looking quizzically at me.
I shrugged, just glad they were leaving.
‘Let’s drink,’ John said, raising a glass of wine he’d chosen from a selection on the table.
The front door closed and Samir came back into the room smiling and stroking his moustache.
‘Who were they?’ Liv asked. ‘They seem so – what’s the word – serious.’
‘They used to be fun guys,’ Samir said, ‘but they discovered God during the summer.’
‘And I thought God had died during the summer,’ said John, draining his glass.
3
I stood outside the camp hospital with the official interpreter, smoking and swapping funny patient stories. We watched an old man push a cart past, stacked precariously with cages of chickens. She stood very close to me when she spoke, touching me on the arm with blood-red fingernails, the polish chipped at the tips. She smelt of jasmine, and a small tuft of blonde hair had escaped from her ponytail at the base of the neck. I c
ould see the dark roots coming through at her scalp. I could also see a small gold cross resting deep in her cleavage. My reverie was broken by John’s voice.
‘Hey Ivan – hey, lover boy,’ he shouted from the entrance, ‘I need you in the clinic.’
Because the war was now supposed to be over, children had started reclaiming their usual illnesses.
The clinic was full of women with kids crying, laughing or just being quietly pale. It was these silent ones, the lacklustre, curled up on their mothers’ laps, who John asked the Palestinian nurse to triage first. This system encouraged more noise outside the examination room as worried mothers tried to be seen first, holding up crying babies as proof of priority. I had a flashback to a few days before: women holding up babies and toddlers to armed men in trucks, telling them, ‘Kiss your father goodbye.’ I wondered how many families in the camp were now without their menfolk. John got me to speak directly to the children, bypassing their mothers’ unsolicited lists of symptoms and diagnoses.
‘If she already knows what’s wrong, ask her why she’s here,’ he would say to me in a Scottish accent strong enough to need internal deciphering. I didn’t translate these pointed comments, sticking instead to the purely clinical. John was at ease in the refugee camp, claiming that it was no more horrendous than some of the Glaswegian tenements in which he cut his teeth as a general practitioner, adding that they probably ate better here, even during the siege.
‘Mothers are the same everywhere,’ he would say. ‘They just want what’s best for their children.’
We worked through a string of minor infections, wounds that wouldn’t heal and diarrhoea from dirty water. Then the nurse brought in a boy, a young teenager who had come alone. He had a painful and bloated stomach. He was reluctant to answer questions and was eventually coaxed into having a rectal examination after some painful prodding of his swollen belly. John probed with a latexed finger, looking into the middle distance in concentration.
Sabra Zoo Page 2
