‘Who were they, the men on the beach?’ asked Eli. She was still finding her breath, leaning on Liv for support.
‘Cowboys,’ said Faris. ‘The same guys who were driving around Hamra in jeeps during the siege but never saw the frontline. Stupid fucking cowboys.’
‘I need a drink,’ said Liv.
Back at the flat we drank warm Stolichnaya and ate my salami and olives. John put on a Donovan record. Although we had electricity, the preference was for candles. To me, the orange light made everyone look haggard and ill. I felt a certain detachment, as if I was behind a screen of frosted glass. I became intrigued by a delay between people’s mouths moving and the sound reaching my ears, like a badly dubbed film. Faris and Liv were arguing, something about the permanent revolution and the failings of the Arab bourgeoisie. Donovan was singing about someone being a Catholic as well as a Hindu, an atheist and a Jew. Someone was explaining the falling out of Trotsky and Lenin and the use of icepicks. Samir was telling Liv that women shouldn’t be so serious. Liv was telling him that perhaps men should be more serious. My hands were clammy, I wanted to wipe them on my shirt but they wouldn’t move, they were stuck to my thighs. I wanted to tell people this; it was interesting and they needed to know. Someone was asking me a question but I couldn’t make out the words or who was saying them. Whoever it was got up slowly; perhaps I’d made them angry and they were coming over to confront me? John loomed into focus. I tried to tell him that he was in focus; he would be pleased at this news. Something was hovering just beyond my mental grasp, something important that I felt I must share once I got hold of it. I saw a flash of light, then everything went dark.
I opened my eyes to see Eli and John looking down at me. I felt the rug beneath my back, saw the shadows on the living-room ceiling. One of them was holding my wrist while the other was wiping my forehead.
‘Bach or Mozart?’ asked John.
‘Er … Bach,’ I said.
‘Good lad. How do you feel?’
‘Tired.’
‘You’ve had an epileptic fit, laddie.’ He was smiling. ‘Too much vodka, too little food.’ He wiped some saliva from my chin. I looked at Eli. I could now tell that it was her hand on my brow.
‘When you’re ready,’ John said, putting a hand under my shoulder. They walked me to the bedroom despite my protests. I lay on the bed.
‘You should rest,’ John said.
‘I’ll stay with him for a few minutes,’ Eli told John.
‘The nurse will take over,’ John said to me. He turned to Eli. ‘He needs to sleep though.’
She frowned at him, pointing to the door. He left and she knelt down and removed my trainers, jeans and shirt. This was the stuff of fantasies but I felt drained and, besides, she did it with such reassuring, professional movements that I was completely at ease. The fit had left me feeling mellow, floating. She pulled the sheet and blanket over me and sat on the side of the bed.
‘You should look after yourself better.’ She said this matter-of-factly, putting a hand to my forehead. I closed my eyes as she stroked my brow. I could hear the others talking, their voices a soothing mumble in the background. The last thing I remembered was the door closing then some rustling, like someone getting undressed.
6
I woke to find Eli beside me in bed, her face towards mine, eyes closed. I didn’t move, watching her breathe softly, her lips slightly parted, some dried saliva at the corner of her mouth. Her hand was on the pillow by her face: I saw the wedding ring she no longer needed but wore because she’d been told it was better, as a foreign woman, to appear married in a place like Beirut. It bit into her finger. Her bra strap, visible where the blanket had slipped, bit into her shoulder. It was the first time I’d spent the night with a woman, yet nothing had happened. My mouth was dry so I slipped out of bed and put on my jeans.
Liv was standing naked in front of the open fridge.
‘How are you this morning?’ she asked, putting her hand to my cheek. She looked concerned. ‘We were worried. That was an impressive epileptic fit.’
I told her I was fine, keeping my eyes fixed on hers. I found a clean glass and tried the tap. Luck was on my side and I gulped voraciously, trying not to think of the rusting tank the water sat in on the roof. Liv headed back to her room with a plate of leftover salami; I watched her walk down the corridor. John was under a blanket on the sofa in the living room. Without waking him I opened the balcony door to release the stale smell of tobacco. I could hear Faris’s muffled deep tones and Liv’s laughter through their bedroom wall. Eli was dressing when I went back into my room.
‘Are you going?’ I asked, not hiding the disappointment in my voice.
‘Don’t look so sad,’ she said. ‘I have to get my things from the hotel.’
‘Your things?’ Surely she wasn’t planning to bring her stuff back here?
‘Before I go to work of course.’
Of course, how stupid of me. My gaze went to her hips; dark hair had escaped from under the top of her white underwear. She pulled on her jeans and looked at me as she tied her hair into two pigtails, finishing them off with black ribbons. I could see her as a girl, with her hair done in the same way.
‘I’m sorry about yesterday, I couldn’t stop the others coming too,’ she said, stepping forward. She kissed me briefly on the lips, her hands cool on my bare shoulders. In the hallway she stopped with the front door open. ‘Have some breakfast. I’ll come by and cook something tonight.’
I picked a spare key from a hook by the door and handed it to her.
‘In case you get back before me,’ I said.
‘I guess this means things are serious between us,’ she said, raising her eyebrows at me to show she was joking.
I had no time for breakfast. I was supposed to meet Najwa and I didn’t want to be late. When I turned into Rue Descartes I was surprised to see her walking towards me, her limp less evident than usual. I knew I was early and wanted to say so but remembered the rule about not recognising each other in public. I glanced at her as we passed and she shook her head slightly, a warning in her eyes. Not wanting to abruptly stop and turn around behind her, I continued walking. As I approached the entrance to the apartment block I saw what had spooked Najwa: the black Mercedes parked outside, the smoking driver leaning against it, not bothering to hide the automatic protruding from his belt. He turned to look at me through sunglasses too big for his face. Without slowing down I passed the entrance, looking inside and taking in the two men talking to the old lady who had questioned my presence in the hall. Luckily she didn’t see me and I resisted the urge to sprint round the corner.
Ten minutes later I found myself outside the Commodore Hotel and went in on a whim, thinking it was a safe place to be for a while. Reporters were sitting in the lobby, waiting for something to happen. The war was finished for them; just the us marines’ departure in a few days and then home. I sat down and picked up an International Herald Tribune. The headline read ‘ARAB LEADERS DISCUSS MIDEAST PEACE STRATEGY’. I was wondering whether I should go back to Najwa’s apartment when a finger appeared over my shoulder, jabbing at the headline.
‘A complete waste of time. It will amount to nothing,’ Samir said. ‘Come on. Bob wants to go to the Green Line.’
The Green Line, demarcation between west and east, Christian and Muslim, Left and Right. It wasn’t that simple (there were many Christians in west Beirut) and yet this shorthand served a purpose, making it easier to digest the unpalatable reality of the city. The old city centre was badly scarred, not from the invasion this summer but from the Civil War. Left-wing militias were handing over token weapons to the Lebanese army and giving up long-held positions. This was the ideal opportunity to illustrate Bob’s story on the return to normality in what he called (off camera) the ‘asshole’ of the world.
After filming pockmarked buildings and the burnt-out Holiday Inn, used as a vantage point for snipers, Bob wanted to go to the east.
‘I know a gr
eat fish restaurant there,’ he said.
‘I don’t know. I should really get back,’ I said.
‘It’s just across the line, ten minutes at most.’
I looked at Samir who shrugged and looked away. ‘He’s the boss,’ he said in Arabic.
The crossing was uneventful. We passed unchallenged through a Lebanese army checkpoint and drove through streets like the ones we’d left behind, although there was less evidence of bomb damage. The restaurant was full of people: families, couples and a group of loud young men. We attracted attention, as Bob didn’t want to leave his huge Sony video camera in the car. A round-bellied man approached us, grinning, arms outstretched.
‘Hello, Mr Bob. Welcome. We have not seen you for some time.’
‘Small matter of a siege, Mr Khoury,’ Bob said, which caused the fat man to guffaw. He showed us to a table overlooking the shore.
Bob wolfed his grilled fish, easing it down with cold Heineken. I picked at mine. My buttocks clenched as I noticed one of the young men get up from his table and approach ours. I had trouble swallowing. He stood at our table.
‘Television?’ he asked in English, pointing at the camera, microphone and video pack.
Bob nodded, his mouth full of tomato salad.
‘And you guys, where are you from?’ the man asked, this time in Arabic, looking at Samir and me.
‘From Beirut,’ said Samir, smiling.
‘East or west?’ came back the question unsmilingly.
I felt for my passport, made eyes at Bob.
‘There is no more east or west, my friend,’ said Samir.
I wondered where he got his cool. The man looked back at his friends.
‘We need to make tracks,’ I said quietly to Bob, hoping that this was an American expression. Another man had detached himself from the group; now they were all staring over at our table. Barrel-chested and with a shaved head, he was putting on dark glasses as he approached us.
Bob took a swig of beer and stood up, picking up the camera.
‘You good-looking guys want to be on TV?’ he said to the men. They both grinned and Bob winked at me. ‘It works every time,’ he said.
Back through the Green Line, I started to breathe again.
‘When did you last go to east Beirut?’ Bob asked when Samir stopped to drop me off.
‘Never,’ I told him.
It was getting dark on Najwa’s balcony. I sucked in cigarette smoke like it had life-enhancing properties.
‘Turns out Nabil is an Israeli informer,’ Najwa said.
‘Nabil?’
‘The guy you exchanged envelopes with at the university.’
‘Shit.’ I inhaled more smoke, looking out at the lights in east Beirut; west Beirut was in darkness. I imagined Nabil over there, laughing at us over here suckered into a summer of solidarity with him. He was probably eating fish in the very restaurant I’d lunched at that day, giving my description to a Mossad officer. ‘Are you telling us, Nabil dear friend, that this is the best you can come up with?’ Of course they’d probably taken photographs.
‘Does he know where you live?’ asked Najwa, gulping red wine like it was iced water.
‘No, we only met at the university.’
We both looked questioningly at each other, thinking back to any contacts we had had with Nabil. It occurred to me that Nabil might know where Najwa lived, but surely we wouldn’t have been sitting in her apartment if that was the case. I kept a nervous eye on the front door anyway.
‘In that case we might have to use your apartment. If it isn’t compromised, that is. We’ll give it a few days to make sure.’
‘Use it for what?’ I asked, thinking maybe they needed to store things in it, documents or forging equipment.
‘Nabil knew where one of our cadres was staying. He moved as soon as we realised what had happened but he can’t stay where he is for long. Your place isn’t known to anyone.’
I nodded, not wanting to speak in case I betrayed my reluctance. It meant the end of waking up to Eli in my bed. I wished I’d been conscious to see her get into it.
‘Are you going to be alright with this, Ivan?’
‘Yes. Yes of course.’
‘What about Samir, do you still see him?’
‘I bump into him occasionally. He’s harmless.’
She didn’t look convinced. ‘OK. Listen. There’s going to be a meeting of cadres in a few days. I need you to watch the place where the meeting happens. Look out for anything suspicious.’ Najwa refilled my glass then her own.
‘Is a meeting a good idea? I mean, getting all those people together in one place,’ I asked. Maybe I was just fearful about being in close proximity to such a gathering given the news about Lazy Eye, or maybe I was just curious, but judging by the look Najwa gave me I seemed to have forgotten my place.
‘Just come back in a couple of days, Ivan.’
I was surprised to find my apartment full of people, but then I remembered I’d given Eli a key that morning. Asha, John, Eli, Faris, Samir and Liv were there, as well as some others I didn’t know. Joan Baez was on the turntable. The smell of hashish came from the living room, the smell of frying garlic from the kitchen. I followed the garlic. Asha, shaking a frying pan over a flame, gave me a one-armed hug and a professional once-over.
‘I heard about your petit mal,’ she said. Chicken joints lay on the side; Samir was finely chopping a huge bunch of parsley to go into his salad.
‘This recipe has been handed down from generation to generation in my family,’ he told Eli, winking at me.
We sat around the coffee table in the living room after dinner. Asha passed a joint from Samir to Liv without it touching her lips.
John, exclaiming that he’d nearly forgotten, handed me a plastic bag. Inside were little square bars, each in a white cellophane wrapping. John took one out and held it up between his fingers.
‘Red Cross survival bars: one of these a day will satisfy all your daily nutrient requirements,’ he said in a cheesy American voice, like in a TV advert. The joint came back to him. ‘Wherever there is war, famine or disease, all you need is one of these to forget your woes. Poverty doesn’t matter any more with the Red Cross nutrient bar, designed to counter even the most deprived diet. Unable to prepare a meal due to bombing and shelling? Then the Red Cross nutrient bar is the answer.’ He recovered his normal voice, ‘Anyway laddie, make sure you have one of these for breakfast every day.’
Samir was constructing a new joint by rolling the tobacco out of a Marlboro without breaking the paper, mixing it with hashish and funnelling it back into the empty casing.
‘How long have you known Samir?’ Eli asked me. She was sitting back in the sofa, her legs tucked beneath her.
‘A few months,’ I told her. ‘He saved me from a wild dog.’
Samir laughed more loudly than usual. ‘A wild dog on a football pitch,’ he said in a constricted voice, trying to keep the smoke in his lungs.
‘A football pitch full of cars,’ I said, giggling – I wasn’t sure how I could be smoking the joint at the same time as Samir.
‘It was the middle of the night,’ said Samir, starting to giggle as well.
‘OK. I’m curious,’ said Liv.
I competed with Samir to see who could stop giggling first. John put Nina Simone on. I was deciding how to tell the story without giving too much away; a part of my brain still retained some caution.
‘Well, to cut a long story short – I was on the football pitch in Fakhani, this was some time in July. It was the middle of the night but there was a full moon.’ I took a drink of Stolichnaya, now mixed with long-life orange juice for health reasons. ‘A lot of people had parked their cars on the pitch. They thought it was safer than leaving them in the streets under the apartment blocks, you know, to stop the rubble falling on them. Anyway, most people seemed to have left them there when they moved to safer areas.’
‘But what were you doing there?’ asked Liv.
�
�Siphoning petrol from the parked cars. Generators were the only source of electricity and we’d run out of fuel.’ The Lebanese Gold and Stolichnaya had weakened my inhibition and I struggled to avoid telling them why we needed to run generators in Fakhani in the middle of the war. A part of me wanted to tell them everything, to be completely open. Najwa would have killed me.
‘Anyway, a pack of abandoned dogs was roaming around the stadium, maybe ten of them, you know, looking for scraps to eat. I could see them circling as I tried to suck petrol from the tanks. Then the shelling starts. One of the shells falls quite close, on the pitch, and I can hear the dogs howling, like they’re scared.’ I sipped my drink, passed the joint to Eli.
‘I see one of the dogs approaching. It’s limping. It’s lost one of its legs in the explosion so it’s confused and in pain. It thinks I caused its injury so it starts barking at me, baring its teeth, frothing at the mouth. But I can’t go anywhere because of the shelling. I’m pinned against the cars.’ I paused and Samir took up the story.
‘I was working in Fakhani, waiting in my car on the street.’ Probably waiting for my father, I thought. ‘When the bombs came down I went inside to the pitch, because I thought it would be safer in there, I don’t like to be inside a building in case it falls down on your head. I saw Ivan hiding by a car with a can of petrol and the dog with three legs coming towards him. It looked crazy, this dog.’
‘What did you do?’ asked Eli.
He took sight down an imaginary rifle. ‘I shot it.’ There were a few seconds’ silence.
‘The start of a beautiful friendship,’ said John.
Samir and I started giggling again but I saw that no one else was laughing except Faris, who was just smiling to himself. I tried to stop. I caught Eli giving me a look. She put a hand on my arm, as if to calm me down.
In truth I knew little about Samir. We’d met when he started driving my father around just before the invasion and had continued throughout the siege. He was a friend forged from adversity. We were very different. Samir was uneducated and, apart from running his little café, drove for a living. He had moved around the different factions of the PLO and Lebanese Left depending on which one he got on with or paid better. I, on the other hand, had gone with my father’s organisation, done the training, and joined Signals without giving much thought to the politics or whether I agreed with them. In a sense I was no better than my old schoolmates Bedrosian and Mustapha, joining their fathers’ import-export businesses, except that they would probably make good businessmen, whereas I knew that I would never be the politician my father was.
Sabra Zoo Page 5
