Half an hour and a Red Cross nutrition bar later I had exhausted my window shopping, which was limited to a handful of places, and caught the shopkeeper’s eye as I stood outside an Islamic bookstore for the fifth time. The bookstore sat between a closed record shop displaying a copy of Pink Floyd’s ‘The Wall’ in the window and the stationers where I used to get the lined notebooks specified by school.
Turning to look up the street to check the entrance to the building I was horrified to see John and Asha walking towards me. They hadn’t seen me so I decided to cross the road, causing an old taxi to screech to a halt against my legs, bumper touching denim. The driver started leaning on the horn as if it would blow me out of the way and simultaneously stuck his head out of his window to let me know, in a screeching voice, how stupid I was, being descended from a donkey. Naturally enough, the commotion attracted the interest of passers-by, who initially kept a respectable distance in case weapons were drawn. I saw Asha and John waving at me, attracted by the commotion, and I stood frozen in the street as the traffic built up. An orchestra of horns had started and, realising that I was no longer holding the plastic bag, I desperately rooted around on the ground for it, retrieving it from under the front bumper of the taxi, now revving its engine ready for the Grand Prix circuit that was Beirut. Asha and John joined me on the street, John giving the taxi driver some Glaswegian invective to match his Lebanese abuse. The crowd – now that a small Indian woman and blond man had entered the fracas and no gunfight had broken out – joined in. Being a spectator was never enough in Lebanon; everyone had an opinion to give and blame to apportion. Eventually the crowd was manoeuvred to the pavement and the traffic started to move, horns blaring parting shots. People started to drift away, the entertainment now over, and I was left with John and Asha asking me what I was doing here.
‘I’m just waiting to meet some old school friends,’ I said, pointing to the coffee shop in the belief that its existence made my story more credible.
‘We’re going to Samir’s restaurant for lunch, to try some of his renowned falafel,’ Asha said, showing me her perfectly formed teeth.
‘Obviously you haven’t been there before,’ I said. My eyes darted to the secret meeting location. For all I knew the cadres could have left in the commotion and I could be sitting here for hours waiting for them to come out. Worse still, an assassination team could have entered the building while I was busy being run over outside. I wished Asha and John would leave. This was an unwelcome leakage of one compartmentalised bit of my life into the other. I saw John glance at my carrier bag, a question (I was sure) starting to form on his lips.
‘Ah, I can see one of my friends,’ I said quickly, looking over their shoulders. ‘I’d better be going. See you later?’ I started to cross the road, more carefully this time, and looked back to see them watching, probably curious to see what my mysterious friends looked like. I stopped on the other side and shouted to them: ‘Don’t eat Samir’s secret sauce.’ They laughed and, to my relief, started to walk off. I went back into the coffee shop to see the same waiter standing before me, arms crossed.
‘What, now you have some money?’
Having given the walkie-talkie back to Najwa and had lunch with her and drunk some coffee, she confirmed that one of the cadres would be staying with me in a couple of days. She wouldn’t tell me who it was ‘for my own good’ and asked me whether there had been any suspicious callers or ‘anything like that’. I couldn’t think of anything in particular, everything looked suspicious at that point. A group of young men standing on the street made me wonder what they were up to (they were probably the same men who stood there during the siege, except now they were unarmed). Seeing two men sitting in a car made me cross the road in case they were a snatch squad. Ever since I’d heard that Nabil (or Lazy Eye, as I still thought of him) had turned out to be an informer, the whole appeal of this secret existence seemed less attractive to me. The glamour, such as it was, had gone. This wasn’t John Le Carré: as I recalled, Smiley’s people hadn’t wandered around with huge walkie-talkies or without enough change to buy coffee.
I consoled myself on the way to Samir’s falafel place with thoughts of Eli and myself in bed the night before. We had slept in our underwear, me careful to hide my arousal by moving my hips away from her as we lay ‘like spoons in a drawer’, as she put it. Unfortunately, every time I moved she would grind her buttocks back into my groin. Eventually I managed to make things subside by thinking of Youssef’s wound being dressed and mentally stripping my Tokarev. That morning I had left her sleeping so I wouldn’t have to explain where I was going. I’d found Liv naked in the kitchen again and, to her amusement, had fetched a robe for her to put on: there was only so much I could take.
Faris was with two men I hadn’t seen before in Samir’s café, huddled together at a back table, one that Samir saved for his ‘special’ customers. I noticed that the two men leant towards Faris to listen or talk to him, not the other way round. I guessed they held him in some respect. I couldn’t see Samir so I walked towards Faris’s table. As I approached he got up and met me half way, drawing me to the counter by the elbow. He smelt of tobacco and aftershave.
‘Buy you a sandwich?’ he asked with a bit too much enthusiasm, not his usual laid-back self.
I explained that I’d eaten, that I was looking for Samir.
‘He’s gone to the airport, some of the foreigners are leaving.’
This information filled my head with thoughts of Eli being driven to the airport. I accepted an ice-cold bottle of Coca-Cola from Faris.
‘Who are your friends?’ I asked, nodding towards the group at the table.
‘Just some brothers from the organisation,’ he said. He looked at me as if to gauge my reaction. ‘We’re just friends now, of course.’
We both laughed at this but I got the feeling that more questions would be unwelcome. Faris’s use of the word ‘brothers’ rather than ‘comrades’ betrayed his political allegiance, although none of that mattered any more, I hoped. My own connections, by default rather than any informed choice, were on the comrade side, but habit prevented me from revealing anything to Faris. There was a time when internecine fighting between various factions of the PLO was a serious business and many so-called martyrs were created as a result, their posters (produced by printers who must have worked overnight) pasted onto the camp walls for a short while until they were covered over by the latest victims. The Israeli invasion had united everyone in the PLO and the Lebanese Left, creating a grandly named Unified Command. Given my circumstances, though, and my experience with Lazy Eye, I kept quiet.
At the Commodore Hotel I found Bob’s Hollywood girlfriend Stacy in the bar, sitting alone and scribbling on a yellow pad, a cold Amstel and a packet of Kent menthols on the small table beside her. There were a couple of men standing at the bar, openly checking her out, wanting her to notice them looking at her. It reminded me of the time my mother had taken me and my brother to a beach south of Beirut, away from the cosmopolitan beach clubs of the city where bathers in bikinis were the norm. A group of men had gathered in the dunes behind us, watching my ultra-blonde and pale mother in her bikini as she lay there, oblivious. I had felt simultaneously embarrassed and protective, wanting to run away and to stay, and ultimately relieved when she became aware of what was happening and got dressed. Remembering the incident made me wince and I glared at the men as I passed them, embarrassed for Stacy. I blushed when she greeted me.
‘Doesn’t that bother you?’ I asked, nodding to the bar. She glanced at the men as if noticing for the first time, then looked back at me. She laughed as she fiddled with her ponytail.
‘You’re an angel, Ivan, you really are.’ She leant forward and lowered her voice. ‘To be honest, it’s the ones that tell me I’m like a sister to them that bother me.’
I laughed and couldn’t think of anything more to say. I asked her if she knew where Bob was.
Bob was stooped over the editing console
in the suite at TeleNews, putting together a story on cluster-bomb victims, which he said was a waste of time.
‘People in the West don’t want to see too much reality over dinner. All the gory stuff gets edited out in London or New York.’ He copied a clip of Youssef’s wound being changed onto his master tape. ‘I think if they showed the real effects of war we wouldn’t have it any more. Soldiers would desert when they saw the kind of injuries they were going to suffer. The bomb manufacturers would close down. The whole fucking insalata would stop!’ He lit a cigarette, shook his head. ‘Well, maybe it wouldn’t stop the weapons manufacturers,’ he said smiling. ‘Those guys would probably pat themselves on the back and buy each other beers if they saw this.’ He pointed at a frozen shot of an uncovered, newly created stump where a hand used to be.
I wondered what sort of person became a weapons designer and came up with the idea of a cluster bomb. I must have wondered it aloud.
‘The cluster bomb was designed to injure, not kill,’ said Bob. ‘Some nerdy fucker, probably an Ivy League graduate, came up with the bright idea that if you injure rather than kill someone on the battlefield then they have to be helped, so you reduce the enemy by two or three rather than just one.’ He tapped the side of his head to indicate either the intelligence or madness of such logic. ‘Of course it’s mainly civilians that get fucked.’ He ran the video and the shot panned back from the stump to reveal the face of a teenage girl with glazed eyes; it was like something inside had been switched off.
‘I think what we need’, said Bob, standing up and stretching, ‘is the company of a beautiful woman.’
‘She’s in the bar,’ I said without thinking. Bob hooted loudly, thumping me on the back. I smiled, pleased that I’d made him laugh. We got to the hotel to find Stacy deep in conversation with one of the men I’d seen standing at the bar earlier. She was laughing at something he was saying but I couldn’t tell whether it was genuine or polite. Bob’s smile disappeared and without even slowing down he swivelled on his heels and headed straight back out of the hotel, leaving me standing in the lobby. I was at a loss to understand why and left before Stacy saw me.
9
Youssef and I were watching refugee-camp boys play football on a patch of scrub down the street from the hospital. I’d taken him out for a change of scene after the staff had warned that further filming of ‘Girl with Prosthetic Goes to England’ would be taking place that afternoon. Youssef’s foot was supported by an attachment to his wheelchair; the yellow-stained bandage was dusty and starting to unravel. I wondered whether it was such a good idea to bring him outside. He was enjoying himself though, cheering the boys on and shouting unwanted advice, which for Youssef meant swearing at those who couldn’t deliver a decent pass. Profanities flew back at him from the players and he was taunted to get on the pitch and do better himself. You would have thought it was a league match, not six-a-side on dusty ground with a plastic ball that needed inflating.
I sat on an abandoned frame of a chair and smoked, enjoying the weak mid-September sunshine. Youssef went quiet once the game was over and the boys disappeared down one of the narrow alleys of the camp. He wanted to go back to the hospital. I started to wheel him up the road but it was hard in the wheelchair as we had to keep moving onto the rubble-strewn edge to let cars pass. To make sure we didn’t get back before the crew had finished I stopped and bought some tea from a man with a cart. As we waited for the vendor to refill our glasses Youssef mumbled something, which I had to ask him to repeat.
‘Maybe we should try those crutches again,’ he muttered.
‘If you think so,’ I said, deliberately underplaying my response. Eli had told me that this would happen, that he would come round in his own time and that I shouldn’t make a big thing of it. We sipped our tea.
I gave Eli the good news back at the hospital, but she reacted with just a smile and ‘OK, good,’ before carrying on her treatment of Donkey Man.
‘You’re not the only one that needs help in this place you know,’ I told Youssef, who wanted instant physiotherapy.
‘What?! That old man couldn’t walk across the room even if there was a naked woman begging him for it at the other end.’
I left him fuming while I found a late lunch in the basement canteen. I avoided Asha and John who were sitting with the hospital administrator, and sat instead with Samir and a nurse I didn’t know but recognised from the ward. Samir introduced us and I had to have the usual conversation.
‘Is that a Russian name?’ asked the nurse. Her name was Fiona; she was Irish. She had a freckled face and copper hair.
‘Yes of course.’ I excavated my chicken stew, looking for chicken, giving her time to take in my blue eyes and dark hair, my Semitic nose. I saw her compare my skin with Samir’s, who I suppose acted as a Middle Eastern benchmark. I was paler than him, but not as pale as her. No one was as pale as her.
‘Are you Russian?’
I shook my head. ‘And I don’t have any Russian ancestors,’ I said, hoping to cut out the next question.
‘Your English is very good.’
‘So is yours.’
She started to apologise, told me that she didn’t mean anything by it, she was just curious about where I was from. I let her flounder for a bit while I ate my stew.
‘My mother is Danish, my father Palestinian,’ I said. ‘I went to a school in Copenhagen where they teach English better than the English do, or so I’m told.’
‘Do you consider yourself Danish or Arab?’ she asked, mopping up the gravy from her stew with flat bread while asking the one question that really vexed me.
Samir interrupted before I could answer. ‘He’s not an Arab!’ he said. ‘There’s no pride in being an Arab any more. I am Lebanese, I am no longer calling myself an Arab.’
I stood up. ‘I am a citizen of the world,’ I said. I thought this sounded better than ‘I don’t know’ or ‘It depends on who I’m with’ or ‘Who gives a shit anyway?’ Surely a better question would have been, ‘What sort of human being are you?’
Later I was standing with Youssef and Eli in the corridor outside his ward. The crutches were not much wider than his legs, which looked like they belonged to an oversized chicken. I lifted him out of his chair and held him up while Eli placed the crutches under his arms. They needed to be shortened, so I held him up some more until Eli was satisfied that they were the right length. You often saw people around the camp walking with splayed crutches because they were too long or, worse still, the crutches were too short and the unfortunate users were bending at the knee to get any support. Youssef, contrary to Eli’s instructions of one step at time, launched off as if triggered by a starter gun. I got in his wheelchair and followed him down the corridor as best I could, shouting, ‘Go! Go!’ in Arabic. Eli was telling me to tell Youssef to slow down but I was wheeling along beside him, caught up in his effort. He was whooping as he went. Reaching the end of the corridor he spun round on one crutch and, because it was easier than standing still, careened forward. With no room to turn the wheelchair quickly enough I was forced to go into sudden reverse, giving my palms wheel burn in the process and almost tipping over as I headed backwards down the corridor. I overtook Youssef and saw him stop and look over my head, wobbling to keep upright.
‘You can’t catch me,’ I yelled, trying to decipher the smile on his face. My wheelchair hit something solid behind me. I looked round to see the hospital administrator rubbing her hip, staring down at me. Any hope that she might have mistaken me for a patient was dispelled when she spoke.
‘What are you doing in that wheelchair?’ she said, grabbing the handles to prevent me moving forward and escaping. We looked at each other for a moment until I realised that she was waiting for me to get out of the chair. Youssef sniggered as Eli (the professional all of a sudden) led him onto the ward. I was left alone with the administrator. She was one of those people who had no trace of the child left in them. I found such people intimidating and difficult to rela
te to. ‘Who are you?’ She squinted at me as if searching her memory.
‘I’m nobody, just –’
‘There you are, Ivan. I’ve been looking for you everywhere. Have you forgotten our appointment?’ Asha’s voice and her arm at my elbow were both welcome, even if it did mean a visit to Intensive Care.
Intensive Care only had three unwilling guests, one of whom was Sharif, the burns victim. My relief at being saved by Asha was cut short on seeing him; his life-support systems were being switched off today. There was a lot of noise coming from his bay, where even more people had gathered round his bed, some of them crying and wailing. The doctor who ran the ICU, a short and wiry-haired Egyptian, was detaching the intubation tube from the hole in Sharif’s throat. The respirator had already been turned off; the heart-monitoring machine was emitting a monotonous note.
‘What’s going on, Doctor?’ Asha asked the Egyptian. ‘I wanted to be here when this happened.’
‘No need for you to be here. I can do this. I have done this before many times. It is normal.’ He was pulling electrodes from Sharif’s chest, trying to get the wires round Sharif’s mother whose head was welded to her son’s shoulder.
‘I wanted to be here for the family. I know you can turn the machines off. It was the family I was worried about,’ Asha said, trying to comfort Sharif’s mother. A couple of women, probably Sharif’s sisters, were trying to lift her from the bed. The heart monitor was flatlining in the background. The young woman, who was Sharif’s fiancée, according to Asha, and who I had last seen wiping his crusted face, was standing to one side, trying to take everything in, her eyes fixed on nothing. One of the sisters covered Sharif’s face with the sheet but this only caused more wailing from his mother. I looked for the off switch on the monitoring machine; the noise was drilling into my ears.
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