Samir took another drag on his re-engineered Marlboro then examined the end.
‘This was grown here in Lebanon,’ he said to nobody in particular.
‘Probably the best export Lebanon has to offer,’ said John.
Later in bed I struggled with my disappointment at Eli not staying the night, although I hadn’t dared ask her in front of the others. Instead I was stuck with Samir in the other bedroom and John on the sofa. I told myself that she was too old for me, that she had a child not much younger than Youssef, that she had a partner waiting in Norway. I told myself these things but they didn’t help me sleep. I replaced them with thoughts of waking up beside her and her goodbye kiss before she went to work, her hands on my shoulders. Except the way I remembered it she hadn’t got dressed and was pulling me back to bed.
7
Donkey Man was up and walking on crutches, visiting all the patients on his floor as part of what he was calling his ‘daily routine’, even though it was only day one. Eli said it was excellent physiotherapy. He’d also been discovered by distant relatives, who came across him while visiting someone in the same ward. Eli and I were now sitting in their two-room breeze-block home as they’d insisted she come for tea. I hadn’t been invited but Eli had asked me along to translate and chaperone. But I was happy to be here, pretending we were a couple. Sweet, strong tea was served in small glasses. We were offered food: cakes and sweets, their syrupy glaze glistening in what little light filtered through the single window. Eli ate out of politeness; I’d told her it was rude to decline these offerings. I nibbled at a sweet pastry, embarrassed at how much effort they’d gone to, given their circumstances. An elderly woman showed Eli her embroidery: intricate, colourful needlework covering every inch of a shawl. I was translating for her, explaining to Eli that the patterns differed according to which area you came from back home. Back home was Palestine, which the woman hadn’t seen for thirty-odd years, not since the Naqba, which I translated as ‘the catastrophe’. Her pride in her work reminded me of my Danish grandmother’s complex Hedebo embroidery. I could picture both women exchanging stitching tips. Neighbours arrived to have a look at Eli, and I was starting to tire from the introductions and from having to say my name at least twice to every person.
I thought, not for the first time, how something as simple as a name could set you apart, particularly in Lebanon. To have a name clearly defining one side or the other, though making life easier in some respects, could have been worse, as it would have pigeonholed me, and the truth was I didn’t feel one thing or the other. Maybe, I thought, sucking half-dissolved sugar from the bottom of my glass, I had the perfect name. Maybe it wasn’t my problem at all, but everybody else’s. I was interrupted by Eli tugging at my sleeve, telling me she had to get back to work.
At the hospital the English film crew was on the kids’ ward filming the photogenic girl having her prosthetic refitted. There were more medics around the bed than the girl had ever seen, even when she came in with her leg dangling by cartilage several weeks before. Youssef was heckling in English from his bed.
‘Have my picture! I can speak the English. I love England. I love Manchester United.’ He sniggered as the girl tried to walk with the prosthetic.
I told him to shut up, asked him whether he was going to try walking himself rather than just mocking others.
‘I have nowhere to go,’ he said. ‘Anyway, I prefer the wheelchair.’ He’d discovered that he could shoot around in a wheelchair, terrorising those who couldn’t move as quickly.
‘You need to exercise your legs. Eli will be angry with you,’ I said.
The cameraman rearranged people around the girl’s bed.
‘Eli is going home soon. Anyway, she doesn’t get angry.’ Youssef started to throw roasted nuts at the gathering around the girl’s bed, making bomb-falling noises to accompany their flight. One landed on the producer’s head.
‘What do you mean?’ I asked, taking the bag of nuts from him.
‘She’s never angry, she’s too soft.’
‘No, not that – what do you mean she’s leaving soon?’
Youssef’s face lit up. ‘You don’t know that your girlfriend is leaving,’ he said in an annoying sing-song voice.
I could feel my ears get hot. ‘She’s not my girlfriend,’ I said, loud enough for the soundman to look round angrily and ask for yet another take.
I found Eli with Samir in the lobby. She was laughing at some joke of his a little too enthusiastically.
‘You want a lift back to town?’ Samir asked me. I told him I’d meet him outside but he stayed where he was.
‘I need to speak to her alone,’ I told him in Arabic.
‘OK, I understand,’ he said in English, winking and grinning at Eli.
‘What was that about?’ asked Eli, pointing at Samir’s back.
‘Is it true you’re leaving soon? When are you leaving? You didn’t tell me you were leaving.’
She put up her hands to shield herself from my barrage. ‘Relax. Did you think I was staying for ever?’ Her voice was low, her tone even, and this calmed me down, made me realise that I was being unreasonable.
‘I’m sorry. I didn’t ask when you were going home before. I forget that you have a life waiting for you outside this,’ I said, gesturing at the lobby. She nodded. There seemed to be more women and children camped in the lobby than before. I couldn’t understand why they were here.
‘I’m due to leave on the fifteenth. I’ve been trying not to think about it.’ She pulled at her obsolete wedding ring. ‘It will be difficult to go.’ I studied a small blemish on her right iris. She looked at me with questioning eyes. I wanted to kiss her; instead I stuffed my hands deep into my pockets. Despite myself, I was leaning towards her. Eli looked at me with concern, pulling back.
‘Let’s talk later,’ she said, looking around, worried about how this would look. I was behaving like the teenager I was. I heard a siren outside, a screeching of tyres then screaming and shouting. These were not good sounds. Four men, one of them Samir, were rushing into the lobby with a stretcher. A shrieking teenage boy was on it, his right leg ending below the knee in a stub of bone and blackened flesh. His left leg was intact but a bloody pulp. A group of people followed the stretcher, their shouting and wailing competing with the boy’s screams. Asha had appeared from nowhere, dragging me into the emergency room.
‘Ivan, tell the boy to keep still. Hold him still,’ Asha ordered. She told Samir to remove everyone who didn’t need to be there. He herded the family outside. His presence was helpful; they took him more seriously than they would me. As I was trying to calm the boy down the film crew, attracted by the tell-tale sounds of decent footage, had found their way into the emergency room, now filled only with the sound of the screaming boy. Asha released a makeshift tourniquet from above his right knee and blood shot from the stump. She tried to find the offending artery and clamp it. The producer looked away, her face white and clammy. A Palestinian doctor was trying to inject painkiller into his arm but the boy was flailing and trying to sit up to look at his legs. Samir helped me hold him down while a nurse tried to find a vein to fill him with morphine.
‘We’ll have to remove this one,’ Asha said, as if talking about an offending hangnail, holding up the frayed left leg which was attached by only skin and flesh to the knee. The cameraman had zoomed in at this point, filling his viewfinder with gore. He lowered the camera. There were tears streaking his cheeks.
‘I can’t do this,’ he said to no one in particular, turning away.
The doctors were oblivious to him as they prepared the now zombified boy for surgery, wheeling him through the double doors, leaving silence in the air and blood on the floor behind them.
After telling the boy’s relatives what was going on, I sat in Samir’s latest mode of transport, a Nissan Patrol with black UN markings on the sides, standard United Nations war-zone issue. Ordinarily I would have been curious as to how Samir got hold of the vehicle b
ut I was reliving my aborted conversation with Eli, unhappy at the way it ended, embarrassed about my behaviour. John and Liv were also in the car and I agreed to go for a drink with them at the Etoile, where most of the volunteers were posted. John himself was posted in a smaller hotel, since he hadn’t come with the same charity as the Scandinavians or Asha. He was telling me that Asha was moving out of the Etoile, which she hated, to stay on the AUB campus in an apartment belonging to a literature professor who had left for America in July.
‘It’s on the seventh floor and looks over the sea,’ John was saying. ‘We should visit her when she moves in, sit on her balcony and read books. Asha says the place is full of books. I miss books.’
I used to read a lot to escape the Danish-Palestinian war that was home, taking refuge under a large pair of headphones to muffle the vocal nature of the conflict. It was a war that had started in 1979, after my brother Karam died falling six floors from a balcony. When he’d fallen he’d broken the family, not just his body. It wasn’t a thing that could be fixed, despite my parents’ efforts. Karam had been as dark as Youssef, taking after my father in looks, whereas I was tempered by my mother’s Nordic genes. Consequently Karam had always been accepted as more of an Arab than I was. I suspected my father preferred Karam for that reason.
I tried to picture the walls of books in our old apartment, the one we were in before we had to move to the relative safety of where I was now staying. Over the last few months the desire to open a book had dissipated, their imagined worlds paling in contrast to the daily excitement of reality. I made a mental note to visit the old apartment as I’d promised my parents, to make sure that all our things were still there.
The combination of the UN jeep and white-skinned passengers meant we were waved through a Lebanese army roadblock unchecked. All of us, apart from Samir, avoided the volunteers congregated in the bar of the hotel and headed for Liv’s room. We found the anaesthetist asleep on Liv’s bed underneath a Scandinavian airline poster of a fjord; she was one of Liv’s four roommates. She’d been on night duty. I was surprised to see Faris asleep in one of the other beds. Liv slapped him on the behind, causing him to sit bolt upright with a terrified look on his face.
‘Poor guy probably thought they’d come to get him,’ said John, pouring Johnny Walker into plastic cups. Faris forced a smile. Liv apologised, offering an embarrassed grin and ruffling his already unkempt hair. I could see an old bullet scar under his right clavicle and wondered what the exit wound looked like the other side. Liv stripped to her underwear and got into bed with him. I removed my sneakers and lay on Eli’s empty bed, resting my drink on my chest. I studied a picture of Eli’s son on the bedside table, looking for a likeness, trying to remember what he was called. John was perched on the fourth bed; he removed his glasses and rubbed his eyes. No one spoke. We drank our whisky and listened to the anaesthetist’s quiet snoring.
Later that night Faris, Liv and I walked through the cooled streets towards my apartment. Samir had gone to pick up the late shift from Sabra, filling the Nissan with nervous-looking young foreign women for the night shift and shouting in Arabic (thankfully) as he left, ‘I may just go straight home with this lot.’ John had gone back to his billet, pleading exhaustion. The streets were darkened by a power cut and lack of moon; no light came from the buildings, not even the orange glow of a candle. There was an unspoken need to stay silent, and Liv whispered to ask me again whether it was OK for them to stay with me. I told her that I couldn’t be happier, that I didn’t want to be alone. To my embarrassment and Faris’s amusement, she stopped to give me a hug.
‘We would never leave you alone, would we Faris?’
I could smell the Johnny Walker on her breath as I returned her hug, pretending to sob.
Faris laughed and patted me on the back. ‘You are like our little brother,’ he said.
Back at the apartment they retreated to the spare bedroom, leaving me with the candle-lit vista of the bottle-strewn coffee table, the bottles’ shadows shifting together in response to the dancing flame. I watched candle wax drip down my Chianti bottle, the new soft wax finding the easiest route over the old hard wax, slowing down as it hardened. I found some music to put on, just to drown out the sound of Liv’s grunting from the next room, but remembered that the power was cut. Liv went silent and I heard a quiet knock at the door.
I could see Eli smiling through the peephole, her face distorted by the small convex lens. I smiled then realised that she couldn’t see me.
We sat together on the sofa, shoulders touching, feet on the table. I had poured her some wine; she rested the glass on her lap.
‘That boy who came in today, he didn’t live through the surgery,’ she said. ‘Asha said he’d already lost too much blood when he arrived at the hospital.’
I caught myself before I said anything trite, preferring to remain silent. I was sick of platitudes, sick of having to hand them out to relatives.
‘What is the worst thing that has happened to you in this war?’ she asked. ‘Was it the dog in the stadium? You don’t have to tell me,’ she added quickly.
I knew what I wanted to tell her. I wanted to tell her how I’d seen Karam run onto the balcony of a friend’s apartment and just keep going, tumbling over the railing, his little hand momentarily grabbing for the rail. I wanted to but I couldn’t. Instead I remembered something else I hadn’t told anyone.
‘It was during the Civil War in the seventies. When the shelling was bad from the east we used to take shelter in the hall of the apartment. It was in the middle and had only one small window, which faced away from east Beirut. It was the safest place to be.’ I leant forward and picked at the rim of the candle on the Chianti bottle to let more wax flow out, trying to direct it towards an exposed bit of glass. ‘We’d gone there one night when they were falling a little close. It seemed to go on for hours. It’s difficult to explain how loud shelling is. It overwhelms everything, drives the very thoughts from your head. When it stopped it was so quiet.’ I took a sip of wine from Eli’s glass. ‘That’s when it started. The screaming. We could hear it through the window, someone in the street. Horrible screaming, you could tell it was a man in terrible pain. I’d never heard a man scream before. The thing is, it went on for what seemed like ages – it wouldn’t stop. It was worse than the shelling. Putting your hands over your ears didn’t help. I just wanted him to stop.’ I looked into the candle flame. ‘I wanted him to die. It’s terrible to say but I just wanted the screaming to stop.’
‘What happened?’ Eli asked, recovering her glass from my hand, letting her fingers linger on mine.
‘The shelling started again. They often did that – stopped shelling until people went out to recover the wounded or check the damage, then they’d start again. Anyway, when it eventually stopped he stopped screaming. Turned out it was the man who owned the corner shop.’
We were both holding the stem of the glass, would probably be holding hands if the glass weren’t there.
‘It’s OK,’ she said, squeezing my hand, ‘you were just a kid. Kids aren’t supposed to hear things like that.’
I could feel my throat constrict with mawkish self-pity at her kindness. I strangled it with a question. ‘What made you decide to come here, to Beirut?’
‘I wish I could say it was for a noble reason,’ she said. ‘The truth is it was convenient for me to be here. I was, I am still, going through a difficult time with my partner in Norway and we needed to spend time apart. Liv was planning to come here; we work at the same hospital in Oslo, you see. She always supports different causes, she’s a good person like that. I decided at the last minute to come with her, even though I knew nothing about the situation; just what I saw on the TV.’ We watched the flames. ‘Are you disappointed with my reason for coming?’ she asked.
‘No, it makes you more human. Anyway, it doesn’t matter why you’re here. You are making a difference. Maybe even more than someone who came here for political reasons.’
‘And to me,’ I said. I was glad she couldn’t see my burning face in the inadequate light. We watched the candle some more. She felt like a radiator beside me, giving off heat.
‘It’s too late for me to go back to the hotel, I think,’ she said.
‘You can sleep here.’ I patted the sofa as an afterthought.
‘I can share with you in your bed – if that’s OK?’
‘That’s OK too.’
‘Just sleeping, like before.’
‘Just sleeping,’ I said.
I thought I’d hidden my disappointment well but she took my hand asking softly, ‘If it’s a problem I can stay on the sofa?’
I shook my head, not wanting to spoil the mood by talking about sex. Maybe that would come later.
8
I was sitting in a coffee bar watching the entrance to the building opposite where the cadres were meeting to discuss whatever cadres needed to discuss when in hiding. I was trying to make my coffee last as long as possible but had to leave after the waiter came up for the second time in three minutes to ask whether I wanted something else. I had no more money so I took to the street, watching, but not sure what for: suspicious cars full of men in sunglasses, jeeps full of armed troops screeching to a halt outside the entrance, someone leaving a large suitcase against the door. Najwa had given me a walkie-talkie, to be used only in an emergency. Unfortunately it was of military specification rather than one for clandestine use by agents of the state, or agents without a state – a hefty thing with a long aerial, intended for the rigours of battle. I had to put it in a carrier bag found in her kitchen when it wouldn’t fit the small inside pocket of my denim jacket. If it came to it and I had to take the damn thing out I might as well jump up and down shouting, ‘I’m here, come and get me!’
Sabra Zoo Page 6
