‘She trying to get you into her knickers then?’ John had asked when I’d escaped back into the consulting room. My surprise at his sneering tone must have shown on my face. He told me that she’d asked for help with contraception.
‘I told her I wouldn’t do it,’ he said, ‘that it was against my religion.’
I snorted sceptically at this and he added, ‘I didn’t want to encourage her – besides, why can’t she go to a pharmacy like everyone else?’ He washed his hands before the next patient, talking to me over his shoulder. ‘You know you’d be better off with someone more your own age. There’s no shortage of nurses willing to put out for a good-looking guy like you.’
Before I could react he’d called in the next patient and we were dealing with projectile vomit.
My sex life, or lack of it, was public property. Not just that, but people were forming judgements about who I should be seeing. I bet Samir and Faris didn’t have this problem. I lit the candle in my Chianti bottle and looked into the flame for insight. Half a candle later and the pre-arranged knock came at the door.
11
I woke just before five in the morning to the sound of screaming jets. But it was just a dream, all was quiet except for the snoring of my secret lodger. I was covered in sweat, and my mood wasn’t helped by the fact that I’d had trouble getting to sleep the previous night. Several years ago there’d been a spate of killings, assassinations the Israelis called them, of senior Palestinian officials in Beirut. Often the families had been dispatched along with the targets and for months I’d spent every night tensing whenever I heard the lift coming to life in our apartment block. We kept an AK-47 in a cupboard in the hall (my father didn’t qualify for his own bodyguards) and, lying in bed, I would run through a scenario in my head where, at the first sound of crack troops breaking down the door, I would rush for the weapon to defend the family from attack. I’d manage to fight them off and be proclaimed a hero. But then I read that Che Guevara decried heroism as a concept, and so I’d adapted my fantasy so that my actions were acknowledged more subtly, with admiring glances and knowing slaps on the back. At the time I had just returned from two weeks of basic military training, but I knew deep down that my perceived ability exceeded the actual skill and experience needed to rebuff such a professional attack. The fact that my father probably wasn’t senior enough to warrant the attention of these secret assassins didn’t lessen my fear, and I’d spent many restless nights too much on edge to sleep. Having the cadre in the place had reawakened these fears, except I had no AK-47 here, only an old Tokarev.
My lodger was sleeping off the whisky I’d had to go and buy him after his arrival. I was to be his only contact with the outside world. The whisky was just one item on a list comprising 200 Marlboro, a bottle of Johnny Walker Black Label, a bottle of Courvoisier brandy, aspirin, tinned ravioli, Turkish delight, digestive biscuits and shaving cream. I also delivered a handwritten letter to Najwa, making sure I wasn’t followed, which meant taking a half-hour route instead of the ten minutes it would normally have taken. I’d confused the notes (written consecutively on the same pad) and given Najwa the shopping list rather than the communiqué. But luckily she’d read it before I left and I handed over the right one. It didn’t do much for my reputation as a revolutionary.
I washed the sweat off with a cold shower – though I couldn’t shake the bad feeling from my dream – and dressed, deciding to leave the house early before I was given any more errands to do. I left a note saying I’d be back at lunchtime.
It took me an hour and a half to reach the hospital on foot. Donkey Man and Youssef were the only ones up, patrolling recently disinfected wards. I wasn’t sure whether I preferred this smell to the usual sickly stench. Donkey Man had graduated to a walking stick and had managed to shave and get hold of a fresh jallabiyah. He was beginning to look human again. He and Youssef were helping to distribute breakfast to still waking patients, as well as an old man with a stick and a boy on crutches could. The orderly distributing the hard-boiled eggs, bread and tea was more hindered than helped and the whole process was taking twice as long. I exchanged good-hearted insults with Youssef and pulled myself up the stairs to the top floor, where the hospital accommodation, such as it was, was situated. During the siege no one wanted to be on the top floor for obvious reasons and the corridors were strewn with old mattresses (stained with bodily fluids) and out-of-date pharmaceuticals donated by well-meaning but stupid organisations that believed people in crisis would be pleased with whatever they got.
One of the wards had been turned into a dormitory. The administration originally thought that volunteers would be happy to live there but didn’t reckon on the European need for privacy and access to restaurants and bars, so the dorm was only used by the needy, desperate or those on call during the night. I knew that Samir sometimes crashed there, sharing the bed of a nurse privileged with the key to the dorm. He omitted to tell them the consequences of being caught with a local in their bed at work. The scandal alone would make coming to the hospital difficult but for some their transient nature in Beirut meant little allowance was made for local sensitivities. In fact many foreigners left common sense at home. I knocked on the door of the dorm and heard shuffling feet before it was opened a crack by Fiona, the Irish nurse I’d met with Samir in the basement canteen. She saw it was me and opened the door a bit wider, looking out to see if I was alone. Her hair was dishevelled and she had a sheet wrapped round her shoulders.
‘Samir’s not in there, is he?’
She looked blank and I started to regret the question, thinking she might be insulted. She could be one of those celibate Christians – I recalled her saying that she was here with a religious charity. I backed away feeling mortified. She just closed the door and when it reopened Samir was standing there, buckling his trousers and looking down the corridor. I didn’t know if he got paid to drive everyone around (I suspect he would have done it for nothing) but if he was found there he would have been fired. We headed downstairs.
Over breakfast I asked him if he would take me to my parents’ place. ‘I want to pick up some stuff. I need some warmer clothes.’ My father was probably on a list of people the Israelis had passed on to their Lebanese agents to make sure they hadn’t forgotten about the evacuation or, if they had, hadn’t been stupid enough to stay in their own homes. I didn’t tell Samir all this but since he’d driven my father around he knew the score. I was keen to leave before Eli got in to work. I thought I’d feel better if, when I next saw her, I’d made true the lie I told her the day before. After breakfast we headed out of the hospital, past the refugees camped in the lobby, and bumped into Asha alighting from a UNICEF minibus with the hospital interpreter and what looked like some UNICEF officials. She stopped when she saw us.
‘I hope you two are coming to my new place this evening?’ She showed her impossible teeth. ‘I’m cooking Keralan food.’
We both agreed. The interpreter was asking me how I was, smiling at me in a slightly maniacal way. I was embarrassed because she was ignoring Samir. Asha wrote the address on a scrap of paper and slipped back into a more serious manner with her escort. The interpreter left a trail of perfume. We watched the group as they entered the hospital. The interpreter was the last to go in. Her jeans were quite tight.
‘Do you think those are Levis?’ Samir asked, giving me a deadpan look. I just shook my head. The guy was impossible. ‘She likes you,’ he said. ‘She’s a Christian, she might let you sleep with her.’
We were travelling in Samir’s yellow Mercedes; the taxi sign was still on the roof. It had the usual charms and trinkets hanging from the rear-view mirror, including some blue beads to ward off the evil eye. Samir drove with his left arm resting on the sill, his fingers only just holding the large steering wheel. His right hand was free to gesticulate, fiddle with the cassette player and change gear. He put on some Lebanese pop music and cranked the volume up while I lit a Benson & Hedges for him. He made a long line of ash o
n it with a single draw.
‘So how is your love life, my friend?’ he asked, glancing at me.
‘Not as good as yours, obviously.’ I watched the ash fall into his lap. ‘What’s your secret?’ I asked, only half joking.
‘Not caring,’ he said.
I was still trying to figure out whether he meant that he didn’t care about the women or whether he didn’t care whether he slept with them or not when we pulled into my street. Samir parked the car two buildings down from mine and we sat for a couple of minutes watching the entrance and for anybody lurking on the busy street, which was a collection of featureless modern blocks with shops at street level. I looked up at the balcony of the eighth floor of my building but saw nothing.
‘Come on,’ Samir said, ‘they’ve either been and gone or have yet to come. What they won’t be doing is waiting.’ The concierge, Abu Sharif, was sitting in his usual chair inside the entrance of the ten-storey block. He didn’t get up when he saw me.
‘I thought you’d left,’ he said, shifting his bulk and making the chair creak. I held my tongue and Samir pressed the button to summon the lift. ‘I thought your father had left the country, no?’ He looked at Samir. I nodded in answer. ‘But you stayed here?’ Abu Sharif had never been quick. I nodded again. ‘Going to your apartment?’ I tried to think of some withering put-down to this obtuse question but Samir took a break from stabbing the call button and came over.
‘Why, is there a problem, old man?’ he asked.
‘No, God forbid, why should there be a problem? I don’t see everyone coming and going of course.’ He pointed at me. ‘His family have been gone for weeks now and these are strange times. Strangers are in town, come from all over looking for somewhere to live.’ He got up and disappeared into his small office, closing the door behind him.
‘Something’s not right,’ said Samir. The heavy concertina door on the lift made a satisfying clanking and clunking, the same noise I used to hear in my bed waiting for assassins. I’d forgotten how slow the lift was; I used to race Karam to our apartment, him in the lift, me on the stairs. I could just beat him if I made him start with the doors closed, because he struggled to open them.
Samir listened at the door as I dug out the key. He gestured to me to listen. I put my ear to it and he smiled as I heard the sound of children inside. I stuck the key in the lock and opened the door.
The first thing to hit me was the mess. We weren’t the tidiest of families but the Kurdish cleaner who came once a week made sure the floors and worktops were clean. Now, the living-room floor was covered with plastic bags and open suitcases. The simple Danish furniture, in contrast to the kitsch favoured by many Lebanese, was covered with old clothes. I didn’t have time to take in much more as two women in headscarves started shouting and screaming at us from the sofa. Samir was telling them to shut up. We were surrounded by a gang of barefoot children, all yelling foul things at us. Samir tried to swat one of them round the head but its mother shrieked at him, pulling the smirking brat behind her ample behind.
‘Get what you need and let’s get out of here,’ Samir said, fending off children’s blows. ‘It looks like your concierge has been putting up refugees, probably charging them rent.’
I left Samir shouting, ‘It’s his house, Auntie. It’s his house,’ while I rummaged through the wardrobe in my bedroom, pulling some long-sleeved shirts and a couple of jumpers into a duffle-bag. They seemed to have left everything where it was and just covered it with their own things. My parents’ room was a pigsty. They’d trashed my father’s desk: newspaper cuttings, handwritten foolscap and photos were strewn on top of the desk, the drawers pulled out and emptied, yielding nothing for these people. The yelling had stopped in the other room. I poked around the debris, picked up an old family photo, taken four or five years before my brother Karam’s death. We were sitting at a seafront café. It must have been taken by one of those roving photographers who harass people in public places. We were all smiling into the camera, we all looked so young. I turned it over to see ‘September 1973’ written on the back. I stuck it in my inside pocket with some other photos, righted a bust of Lenin (after whom I was named) and headed for the living room. Samir had found a place to sit amongst the clothes and was drinking coffee served by the women in our cups, made with our coffee pot on our cooker.
The bookshelves, lining a whole wall in the dining room, had been cleared of books and were now home to a black-market operation: boxes of candles, tins of chickpeas, shiny silver flashlights, powdered baby milk, tins of ghee, bottles of Napoleon Five Star brandy, cartons of Marlboro, Winston, Kool, Kent and Benson & Hedges and wholesale boxes of Mars Bars. They were offering me packs of cigarettes and a bottle of whisky but I was gathering my mother’s opera records up from the floor. I put them under my arm and told Samir that we were leaving. He picked up his 200 b&u and bottle of Johnny Walker, then put them down again when he saw my face. As we left, I turned and handed the house key to one of the snotty kids standing in the hall. I ran down eight flights of stairs, leaving Samir to wait for the lift. I could find Abu Sharif nowhere.
Back at my apartment, rather than my home, which I’d left for the last time, my lodger was hungry. I went back out again to fetch burgers and fries from a takeaway down the road.
‘Good man,’ he said, and we ate them in the living room, washed down with warm Amstel beer. ‘By the way, someone was at the door earlier,’ he said, his moustache shiny with grease. ‘A foreign woman, from what I could see through the security hole,’ he added. ‘That’s the type of company you need if you’re holed up like this – I nearly asked her in.’
If Samir had said the same thing it would have been funny, but from this older man who looked like an accountant it sounded unsavoury.
‘I hope you don’t mind,’ I said. ‘I’ve arranged to meet her tonight.’
‘Like father, like son, eh?’
My lie gave me an excuse not to spend another evening playing cards and drinking whisky. My real plan was to go to Asha’s at the AUB. But who knew, maybe Eli had also been invited.
12
The AUB campus occupied a large part of the north-westernmost tip of west Beirut. It would take you at least an hour to walk the perimeter. The high wall that surrounded the campus gave it an exclusive feel, protected from the rest of the city at whose head it was situated. Parts of it were just large tracts of pine trees and bracken. As kids my friends and I could play in whole areas of the campus for hours without coming across anyone apart from the occasional couple of students engaged in heavy petting. Over time we came to know their favourite haunts, staking them out in the futile hope of witnessing some actual sex rather than just hearing about it second-hand.
On a whim I cut into the darkening wood off the well-lit path, following a trail that acted as a short cut between faculty buildings. It reminded me of the ambush lessons in military training and playing hide-and-seek as a kid. One of the thrills was trying to be invisible, part of the undergrowth, wedged into a bush and absolutely still, just waiting. I tried it, squatting behind a shrub off the path, just to see what it felt like again. It felt foolish, hiding when no one was looking for you. I rejoined the path. I couldn’t shake the feeling of anger at finding people in our house, even though we were no longer living there. I wondered what my mother would have said – she, veteran of the Christiania squats in Copenhagen, having her own home squatted in. Perhaps she wouldn’t have minded, but hopefully she’d be pleased that I’d rescued her records. I hadn’t spoken to my parents since they’d left the city or indeed even thought about speaking to them. I wasn’t even sure where they were; was it Damascus or Tunis they were going to?
I walked down towards the campus apartments that looked out over the Mediterranean. I’d been here before. They were the same blocks my mother visited every Thursday after Karam’s death, while I occupied myself on campus. I never knew which apartment she was in or indeed whom she was visiting, my curiosity dampened by the freedo
m of a couple of hours to myself. My father later told me she was visiting a ‘head doctor’. I would meet her at the edge of the AUB playing field, where older boys pumped iron and did chin-ups, in a hurry to look like men. I wondered, as I sought the right block, who it was my mother had been visiting every week.
Everyone was there, including Eli, who immediately came over to ask me where I’d been. She looked worried and rubbed my arm, letting her hand trail down to the back of mine. I was pleased to see her but wary because I didn’t want to lie to her again.
‘I came to your place this morning, on the way to Sabra,’ she said. Santana was playing in the background. ‘Someone was inside; I could see them at the peephole. Was it you?’
John’s voice reached me from a bookcase that covered the length of the open-plan living area. ‘Ivan,’ he shouted, weighing a book in each hand, ‘Camus or Balzac?’
‘Camus,’ I shouted back, having never read Balzac, and glad of a reason not to have to try to explain things to Eli. I got a nod as a reward and Liv handed me a drink with a sway and a smile. Asha was calling Eli into the kitchen but we held eye contact for a few seconds more as I tried to communicate, with my eyes alone, my desperate longing to be with her. Her eyes were full of questions. Asha called again and she was gone. I stepped out onto the large balcony to get air. Standing back from the railing, I admired the excellent view of the sea with the palm-lined Corniche far below, where we had run from the gunfight. Faris sat in a chair smoking, looking out at the gunboats, too deep in thought to notice me. The long fronds of the palm trees swished in the breeze. It was a peaceful contrast to the day’s events. Samir released me from my thoughts by slapping me on the back and spilling my drink. Someone turned up the music inside to the guitar riff of a song you just knew was going to explode into something bigger, more exciting. The noise from the large floor-standing speakers made it sound like the group was in the room. We were gripped by a common unspoken urge to dance. Eli was dragging me into the living room while Samir moved the coffee table. Asha grinned and jerked awkwardly, incongruously matched by John’s big wavy movements. Even Faris had been pulled into the room by Liv and was dancing with one hand held high, keeping his cigarette out of harm’s way. Only Samir refused to dance, but stood at the side clapping his hands in time to the beat. I let myself be consumed by the music and Eli became a blur in front of me as I swung round, my body moving in a way over which I seemed to have no control, as if guitar chords had replaced the signals transmitted by my brain. I felt a surging elation and could hear whooping and shrieking as our whirling became increasingly frantic. The song ended and we all collapsed, laughing and sweating.
Sabra Zoo Page 9
