‘He is not your patient, this is my ward,’ said the ICU doctor.
‘You’re right, he is not my patient, but I know the family – I told them I would be here for this.’
‘You didn’t tell me you wanted to be here,’ he said.
‘Is there a problem?’ the fiancée was asking me, gesturing at the two people in white coats standing over her dead fiancé. She was holding a gold chain with a little Koran at the end; maybe it came from Sharif’s neck. Her eyes were puffy and her skin pasty. I told her that nothing was wrong, that they were talking of medical things. This must have sounded stupid given that Sharif was dead but she was in another place, she didn’t notice.
‘The Imam is coming to wash his body,’ she said, ‘to shroud him before burial. We need to remove his bandages – is that OK?’
I moved to the end of the bed, which Asha and the ICU doctor were now leaning over, both talking at the same time. Sharif’s dressings smelt; no one had thought it worthwhile to change them. ‘Listen …’ I said, trying to be heard over their overlapping voices, the maternal wailing and the drone of the machine, but I’d become invisible. I tried again in a louder voice: ‘I need to ask a question.’ This time I got their attention and they looked at me, moving away from one another. In English I told them that the family wanted to prepare the body for burial. The fucking machine droned on. I could now see where it was plugged into the wall.
‘Who are you?’ the Egyptian doctor asked me in Arabic, deliberately ignoring what I’d just said. Everyone wanted to know who I was, I had to explain myself to everyone. What I wanted to say was, ‘Who I am doesn’t matter, what matters are the feelings of these people here.’ Instead, I just told him I was the translator.
‘I don’t need a translator,’ he said. He smiled at me and looked around for someone to share his stupid joke with. I thought about answering but I did the clever thing and avoided getting into a discussion, understanding that being rational was not top of his agenda. This was understandable, given the previous few months of intensive hell in this place that he called his ward. Instead I moved to the wall and yanked the plug from it, killing the machine, killing the noise.
Back at home electricity came out of the sockets, water from the taps. I was making risotto with an old chicken stock cube I’d found, planning to finish it off with half a packet of butter I’d picked up on the way home. John was in the shower; Samir, Faris and Liv were in the living room. Eli was watching me cook.
‘I like being here, in your apartment,’ she said as I stirred the risotto.
‘Really? Because I’m not sure whether I like attractive Scandinavians being here,’ I said.
Her face went blank for a few seconds before realisation flooded it. ‘Ah! You are joking with me?’
‘Yes, I am joking with you. Help me serve the risotto.’
After eating, Faris read from a two-day-old copy of The Times that John had brought with him.
‘“According to a United Nations report, between 6 June and 15 August 6,775 people have been killed and 30,000 others wounded. Over 80 per cent of these victims were civilians from west Beirut. According to the same source, 2,094 seriously injured persons had been burnt by phosphor bombs.”’
I thought of Sharif, who had started in the last statistic but could, since that afternoon, also be added to the first. A headline on the front read: ‘LEBANESE LOATH TO SEE MARINES DEPART’. Samir lit a joint but was the only one who smoked it with any conviction.
‘Maybe the war will change the way the world thinks about the Israeli problem,’ Faris said, putting the newspaper down.
‘Don’t you mean the Palestinian problem?’ asked Eli.
I caught John rolling his eyes but she was right, that was how everyone referred to it.
‘The Israelis are the ones that came all this way to Beirut to try and get rid of us – they are the ones with a problem,’ Faris told her.
Eli shrugged.
‘The world will be interested for five minutes maybe, then it will all be forgotten,’ said John. His face was still pink and blotchy from the shower. ‘Even if they manage not to wipe you out.’
‘You should wipe that out,’ Liv said, poking at John’s paunch through his T-shirt. He swiped her hand away.
‘They could never destroy us completely,’ said Faris. ‘Look what happened – all the fighters left Beirut with their weapons and the Israelis had to watch from gunboats. They, more than anyone else, should know you cannot make a people disappear.’
‘Then all this war and suffering must continue,’ said Eli, as if it had just occurred to her as a possibility.
‘The Palestinians are used to suffering – it’s in our blood,’ said Faris with a grin.
‘You don’t have a monopoly on suffering,’ said Liv, tickling him under the chin. ‘People all over the world are the victims of injustice, some get even less support than you do, believe it or not.’
Faris raised his eyebrows at her. He picked the newspaper up and folded it, put it down again. ‘You are right, but it is the only suffering we know, we don’t know anybody else’s.’
An hour later Asha and John decided to go back with Samir.
‘Beatles or Rolling Stones?’ John asked me as he got up.
I shook my head. I couldn’t be bothered with his silly questions; why did you have to choose between one and the other? ‘Too difficult,’ I said.
‘No it’s not,’ he said, disappointed.
Asha and Samir had already left and Faris and Liv had disappeared into the bedroom. Eli followed John to the front door. I started to clear the coffee table, watched them have a whispered conversation which ended with John shaking his head. Eli looked pissed off. When John had gone I asked her what they’d talked about.
‘I just wanted some medical advice, but he is so …’ She waved her hands for the right word.
‘Why don’t you ask Asha?’
‘She’s a Catholic.’ She took dishes into the kitchen while I tried to work it out. I didn’t want to pry. I finished the dregs of wine from various glasses, relit the end of Samir’s joint. After a while the power went and we lit candles in the sitting room.
‘Do you think it is possible to love two people at the same time?’ she asked me.
It was getting late. I stared at the fresh candle burning in the Chianti bottle. I was too tired and drunk to think about it. ‘Ah, I suppose so, up to a point. But you could never love them both at the same time. I mean at some point you’d need to choose between them, like if you wanted to go on holiday with one of them or something.’ I shut up before it became obvious that I didn’t know what I was talking about; obviously hashish and alcohol couldn’t give you insights you didn’t already have.
‘I suppose you are right.’ She smiled but in a sad way and I wondered whether I’d said the wrong thing and blown my chances.
‘Shall I stay again?’ she asked.
‘Yes of course, it’s too late for you to walk back to the hotel – but I think I’ll sleep out here,’ I said. Taking her hand I studied her short, neatly cropped nails. I wanted to explain that it wasn’t that I didn’t want to be with her, but I wanted to be with her in a different way. That I couldn’t lie next to her warm, soft and curvy body with her nice-smelling hair in my face without wanting to know what it was like to be with her properly. To be with any woman properly would be good, but with her I thought would be special. It was difficult not to wrestle her to the sofa there and then. Perhaps that was where I was going wrong, maybe I was too timid.
‘You are right,’ she said, ‘it isn’t fair to expose you to the temptation of a sexy woman like me without experiencing the full delights.’
I looked at her straight face, eventually remembering to close my mouth. ‘You are joking with me?’ I said.
‘Yes, I am joking with you.’ She laughed, took my hands in hers and looked me in the eye. ‘I need to sort something out before we can be together, you know, as, ah, lovers.’ She blushed as she said
this. ‘Hopefully tomorrow night,’ she added. She got up and tugged at my arms, trying to pull me up from the sofa. ‘Let’s sleep together again tonight, just one more night. I don’t want to be alone. Do you want to be alone?’
No, I didn’t want to be alone.
10
At Beirut port, Bob, Stacy and I were just three in a company of maybe a hundred journalists covering the withdrawal of the us marines. I’d not seen that many together since Arafat left from the same spot two weeks ago, passing the same marines that were now leaving. Stacy was waiting with us, a battered reporter’s notebook in her hand. They weren’t talking, her and Bob, although both of them talked to me. It was an uncomfortable situation, like being with my parents at the dinner table during one of their arguments, arguments that – while his name was never spoken – were always about Karam.
We were all waiting for something to happen. I was standing with a videotape pack round my shoulder, holding a boom microphone plugged into it. I had my headphones round my neck and I was umbilically connected to Bob’s camera which perched on his shoulder like a mechanical eye. I fiddled unnecessarily with the sound levels, thinking about what might happen that night if everything worked out with Eli. Bob asked me why I was grinning, but it was Stacy’s inquisitive look and her little smile that made me blush. Stacy looked different to me that day, like I was already seeing her in a new light, a light that Eli had tantalisingly shone my way. When she walked over to interview a bespectacled captain, latching onto him with her killer smile, I saw the other journalists (male and female) follow her lazily with their eyes, as if distracted by the passing of an escaped party balloon. By the next morning I hoped to understand what it was they were seeing, rather than relying on my own vivid imaginings. I checked Bob out but he didn’t (or chose not to) notice the attention Stacy was getting, preoccupied with some technical colour balancing of his camera against a white wall.
There was a sudden scramble for a small piece of high ground to get the best shot of the last marine getting on the last amphibious transporter. I ended up entangled with a baseball-capped photographer who kicked me in the shins to beat me to a better sight-line.
‘Fuck this,’ said Bob, putting the camera down. ‘There must be a more interesting story to be had in this place.’
I said goodbye to Stacy, who was staying to do more interviews, and we headed back to the Commodore. I asked Bob’s regular driver Mahmoud to drop me off near Najwa’s road but we got stuck in a traffic jam near the old prison, emptied during the siege. I told Bob that, in the chaos of the Civil War, a rumour went round that all the prisoners were going to be freed on a particular date. On the allotted day relatives started to arrive at the gates to pick up their imprisoned loved ones and, sure enough, the prisoners started to trickle out. The thing was, I told Bob, that the living victims as well as the relatives of the dead victims of those incarcerated had also heard the rumour about prisoners being freed and had also turned up outside the prison. Rather than coming with flowers, they came with guns. Gunfights broke out at the prison gates between those greeting prisoners and those there to settle scores. Some of the prisoners never made it beyond the pavement outside the prison, either being shot down or bundled into a car. It turned out that some of the prisoners refused to leave, deciding that it was safer to stay inside. Bob started chuckling, so I translated it for Mahmoud the driver so he knew what Bob was laughing at. He nodded in recognition.
‘Yes yes! That is Lebanon,’ he said. They were both still chortling when they dropped me off.
I was surprised to see Najwa’s superior, Abu Hisham, open the door to her flat. The last time I’d seen him was in Fakhani, just before the PLO withdrawal, burning documents in sawn-off oil drums. There had been a rushed, round-the-clock attempt to microfilm as many of them as possible before they were destroyed. I assumed the microfilms left during the evacuation. Abu Hisham was the one who convinced me that staying behind in Beirut would be good for me, that I would be useful. At the time it had seemed like a good idea, an opportunity to prove that I could do something worthwhile and be self-reliant for the first time. My mother hadn’t been so keen on my staying but the truth was I saw it as a way of escaping my parents and the haunting of Karam’s ghost. I could hear Najwa clattering plates behind the closed kitchen door.
‘I didn’t know you’d stayed behind,’ I said, after we’d exchanged greetings.
‘I’m just visiting. Wanted to see you before I went back.’
I could see that he was keen on a heart-to-heart in the way he sat opposite me, leaning forward, smiling but appraising. His kindly disposition didn’t fool me. I looked out onto the veranda and lit one of Najwa’s Kents, offering him the packet.
‘Does your mother know you smoke?’ he asked disapprovingly.
I smiled and shook my head. He pulled a stick from the packet.
‘Have you seen my parents?’
‘No. We’ve been dispersed to the four corners of the Mediterranean. We’re still trying to get the infrastructure working again. These are difficult times,’ he continued, adopting a more formal tone, dragging on his cigarette and examining it for something to explain its appeal. ‘We’re all under a lot of pressure, living in these politically and militarily uncertain times, and we are all having to make sacrifices. Now that the multinationals have gone, who knows what’s going to happen.’
My mind coasted as he went on about political responsibilities. I was thinking about seeing Eli again that night. I hadn’t arranged anything with her in the morning; I’d been asleep when she’d left for her shift, but she’d left a note with the question ‘Tonight?’ written over a small heart. I felt the need to buy her flowers or something, to make the event special. I wondered where I could get Belgian chocolates in a city that had just come out of a siege. A change in Abu Hisham’s tone of voice brought me back to Najwa’s sitting room. He was looking at me expectantly, like someone waiting for the answer to a question. I started to feel hot.
‘Well, I’m not sure …’ I said, trying to gauge his reaction.
‘Have you been listening to anything I’ve said?’ he asked.
‘Of course I have.’ I knew I sounded defensive.
He raised his hands in exasperation and laughed. ‘This is precisely your problem, Ivan, you are always daydreaming.’
I shook my head. ‘No …’
‘It’s normal at your age to be focused on women and alcohol. But you need to look at the bigger picture, how you can contribute to the wider struggle.’ I looked out over east Beirut. ‘Don’t look so down-hearted, Ivan. You did a good job in Fakhani. Everyone remembers your steadfastness over Black Thursday, don’t lose what you have gained because of superficial things.’
I thought back to Black Thursday, manning the radios alone in the Signals basement in Fakhani, the rolling barrage so intense that at its peak I could count an explosion every second. It had started out as a routine night shift with a routine air raid that began towards dawn, but it didn’t stop. Six hours of uninterrupted shelling later and the senior cadre on duty in Fakhani had rung through to say he was leaving his post to go somewhere safer and gave me a number to ring in case of an emergency. I wasn’t sure what would qualify as an emergency, given the attempted re-creation of the Allied bombing of Dresden, but he’d hung up before I could recover the power of speech. I’d stayed another six hours, alone with the silent Racals and Motorolas. The fighters, who usually radioed in every hour on the hour, had to maintain radio silence in case they gave away their positions to the screaming F-16S above. At one point, with my head between my knees and plaster dust raining down on me, I was convinced that I was going to be buried alive, had even thought about praying to God, until it struck me that if he existed he would be the same God that was making this happen. I looked up to see cockroaches being shaken from the cracks in the wall by the shuddering of the foundations. They scuttled about in confusion, with nowhere to run to.
The bombing had stopped with a sudden
and ear-ringing silence. By the time I’d checked with all the hand-helds that everyone was alive I was relieved by the next shift, eighteen hours late due to the viciousness of the bombing. I’d been driven home, had wept with exhaustion and slept for ten hours. The next day the BBC World Service informed me that I’d lived through one of the most ferocious bombing raids since World War Two, stopped only by a telephone call from Reagan to Begin. Now, according to Abu Hisham, I had been mentioned in dispatches for this involuntary episode.
Najwa brought salad, cheese and bread into the room. The grey streak in her hair had disappeared and it was curlier than before, more styled. It was sensible to make herself less conspicuous, I thought. Abu Hisham jumped up to take the food from her. I saw Najwa give him a smile I’d not seen her use before, coupled with something in the eyes.
‘Tonight we will be moving a cadre to your home,’ she said, handing out plates.
‘Tonight?’ I asked incredulously.
Abu Hisham nodded, his mouth full of salad. I tried to hide my dismay by stuffing bread into my mouth.
‘We discussed this, Ivan,’ Najwa said, exchanging a see-what-I-have-to-deal-with look with Abu Hisham.
‘Of course we did,’ I said, my voice whiny, ‘but I didn’t know it was tonight.’
‘What’s so special about tonight?’ Najwa asked.
There was no longer anything special about that night as I sat in my living room, having made up the spare room for my clandestine lodger, replacing the sheets used by Liv and Faris. It was several hours since I’d left Najwa’s and I’d since done a stint in John’s clinic at the hospital. Eli had come looking for me (usually it was the other way round) and, much to John’s disgust, I’d left mid-consultation to speak to her. She’d asked me what time she should come round but I had to come up with an excuse as to why I couldn’t see her. Looking back, it must have sounded lame, something about having to visit the family home we’d left during the siege to make sure everything was OK. It was the type of lie that was truth-tinged enough to seem acceptable to the liar; I had promised my parents that I would check on the place. Why I’d prefer to do that than have sex for the first time would have been difficult to explain had she asked. The disappointment followed by bafflement on her face was such that I was tempted to come clean, perhaps by touching on the heroic nature of my deeds; the last scene in Casablanca had come to mind. Najwa’s face had loomed, however, and I just apologised some more.
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