Later, when it was too dark to see the sea any more we sat out on the balcony with Ella Fitzgerald’s voice easing out through the door. Liv was more animated than usual, her cigarette describing strange figures in the dark.
‘The idea of romantic love is nonsense, a myth. If you can’t live without someone else that’s not love, it’s a mental illness,’ she was saying.
Eli was shaking her head. ‘Then how do you explain the jealousy, the pain of separation or worrying about the other person if they are ill? How do you explain desperately wanting to be with someone?’
Liv nodded her head energetically, eager to jump in. ‘Exactly, exactly. You’re just describing the symptoms of romantic love. These feelings – jealousy, anger, need – are just about you, not the other person. They are feelings linked with the fear of losing the other person, fear of being alone.’
Asha’s voice was measured and calm compared to Liv’s. ‘Do you remember that man in the field hospital who lost fourteen members of his family all at once?’ There were nods round the table. He was a big man whose apartment took a direct hit from a rocket that killed everyone in it apart from him. He’d been impaled on the railing three floors down after being blown out of his house.
‘Every day,’ she continued, ‘he would sit with anyone who had no visitors or was feeling depressed or just come out of surgery. He would talk to them, play cards with them, fetch them water and food.’ She hesitated and refilled her glass with water. ‘He would hold their hands.’ She looked at us and smiled. ‘That’s love,’ she said, ‘the rest of it is just …’ She waved her hands dismissively.
‘Doesn’t your husband mind you being here?’ Samir asked her.
‘I’m sure he misses me,’ she replied, ‘but he’d be disappointed if I hadn’t come.’ She sipped from her glass. ‘If he seriously objected we probably wouldn’t be together. Can you understand that?’ she asked Samir with a smile.
He shook his head.
‘He loves you because you are here,’ Faris said quietly, continuing to look out to sea.
Asha smiled.
Liv punched Samir playfully on the arm. ‘The world is bigger than just two people, you know.’
‘My partner hates me being here,’ Eli murmured.
I was probably the only one who heard her since she was sitting next to me. I caught her looking down at her hands.
‘I only came here for the excitement and the hashish,’ said John. Asha raised her eyebrows at him. He leant towards Samir: ‘I said I only came here for the excitement and hashish.’
Samir rolled his eyes and reached into his inside pocket. Asha asked how they would get to Sabra from the campus the next day and Samir told her to be at the Etoile first thing.
John sucked on Samir’s spliff. ‘This place must be the antithesis of Sabra,’ he said, waving his hands to indicate the apartment and the campus.
Faris spoke for the second time since dinner. ‘Maybe the camps won’t be there much longer,’ he said.
‘What do you mean?’ asked Asha. She was piling dirty plates.
‘The Phalangists say they want to turn Sabra into … What do you say? A place for animals,’ Faris said. He was looking out into the black, as if addressing some unseen audience. The silent response made him look round and he registered our incomprehension. ‘You know, what do you call it, an animal garden? A menagerie?’
‘You mean a farm?’ asked Liv.
Faris shook his head.
‘No,’ I tell her. ‘He means a zoo. They want to turn it into a zoo.’
I helped Asha with the dishes.
‘Ivan, John will be staying in the second bedroom but there’s another bed if you want. I don’t think he snores.’ She smiled and I thanked her but she hadn’t finished. ‘I mean it, Ivan, please feel free to stay when you need to. You can stay tonight if you want.’ She checked to see that we were alone and took a key from her pocket. It had a keyring with an AUB crest on it, a cedar in a circle. She put it in my hand. ‘Only you and John have one of these.’ She looked again to the door. ‘I know some things may seem exciting at the time, Ivan. But that doesn’t mean they’re a good idea.’
Samir came in. ‘We’re going, my friend.’
Samir dropped Faris, Liv, Eli and me off at the Etoile before heading back home, wherever that was. Faris didn’t want to go into the bar.
‘You don’t know who your friends are in a place like this, west Beirut is crawling with lowlife,’ he told me in Arabic. Instead we went straight to Eli and Liv’s room. The anaesthetist who shared the room was on night shift at the hospital. Faris stripped to his underwear and got into Liv’s single bed. Eli and I did the same and hopped into hers. Liv, however, paced the room in her underwear, smoking and talking politics until Eli said something curt in Norwegian. Liv pulled a face but turned out the light and got into bed with Faris. I was feeling pretty exhausted but Faris and Liv were smoking and whispering in bed, giggling. I was spooned behind Eli, watching a pulsing vein in her neck, lit through the window by a weak moon. She smelt familiar, musky and warm. The noises from the other bed, only a couple of metres away, turned into muffled but unmistakable sounds of sex, complete with creaking springs. Eli turned towards me with a disapproving face, sticking her fingers in my ears. I smiled and she leant over to speak into my ear, her hair tickling my face. I looked between her breasts, pale crescents formed by a frayed bra.
‘We should go to your place,’ she murmured, looking at me, giving me a chance to explain why we couldn’t.
‘We can’t go there. Maybe in a few days, but not yet.’ She sank back into the bed and looked at the ceiling.
‘I’m going home in two days.’ Her whispered words were a blow to the stomach. I felt like crying. Instead, I watched an auburn cockroach cross the wall opposite until it disappeared into a crack. The creaking in the other bed stopped. There was rustling and a sulphur flare lit the room briefly. Cigarette smoke came our way. Eli’s breathing slowed and got deeper. I wanted to toss and turn but had no room. I wished I’d succumbed to Asha’s insistence that I stay with her and John; I could have been in my own bed now. Overwhelmed with tiredness and wishing I could slip out and go to my own bed I lay looking up at the ceiling, following a crack as far as I could until it was too faint to see.
13
Emile called to me as I turned onto my street. He was with Mustapha and Bedrosian, as well as a couple of other ex-schoolmates. Emile had textbooks under his arm and was wearing an AUB sweatshirt over a buttoned shirt, and I hated him for it. Bedrosian and Mustapha were wearing blazers and trousers, like they were going to a business meeting. A September chill had fallen on the city; I could feel it through my denim jacket and T-shirt. I hadn’t slept well; the joys of sharing a small bed were limited without the sex. I fought the urge to run, deciding to sweat instead. I mustn’t lead them to where I was staying, not with a cadre hiding there. I didn’t have time to think as they crossed the road towards me. I could see mischief in Emile’s green eyes.
‘Are you on your way to class?’ he asked, taking in my dishevelled appearance and lack of books. I’d not prepared an answer for this obvious question. By his smile and the giggles of the others around him, I suspected they knew by then that I wasn’t enrolled, but they wanted to hear me say it.
‘I’m going to university in Copenhagen,’ I said. I was pleased with this inspired thinking and it had the desired effect of wiping the smirks off their faces.
Emile, however, hadn’t finished. ‘When are you going then? Surely they’ve started already.’
‘No, no, they start much later there. I’m going in a week or so, once everything has been finalised.’ I looked up and down the street, hoping for a gunfight or car bomb.
‘So which university are you going to?’ asked Bedrosian, whose father, I recalled, did a lot of business in Copenhagen.
I searched my memory for the name of a university, frustratingly difficult despite the fact I’d lived there as a child and my mother
had lectured there. Bedrosian and Emile exchanged satisfied smiles as they sensed victory.
‘Copenhagen University of course, idiot,’ I said, banking on the fact that such a place existed. The smiles disappeared and we stood there for a bit, each waiting for the other to leave.
‘Where are you off to now?’ Emile asked, shifting his interrogation. ‘You don’t live round here, do you?’ Some members of his group were getting bored and started to drift off, telling him they were going to be late for lectures.
‘You’re going to be late,’ I said. I pointed past him to the others and he turned to go, Bedrosian and Mustapha in his wake. To give them time to disappear before I headed towards the apartment I decided to get some breakfast. I started to cross the road to the café on the other side of the road when Bedrosian came running back towards me.
‘I almost forgot,’ he said, wheezing with the effort of jogging. ‘Three of your father’s friends came looking for you yesterday.’ He caught his breath. ‘They were outside the cafeteria, seemed to know that we knew you. Wanted to know if we’d seen you.’ He looked at me and sucked air through his moustache, which was growing over his top lip.
‘Did they give their names? What did they look like?’ I asked, trying to control the panic in my voice.
He looked into the middle distance to show that he was remembering.
‘They didn’t give names.’ He looked round to the receding figures of his mates, turned to go, then stopped. ‘So what do you want me to tell them when they come back today? They said they’d come back.’
‘Nothing, for God’s sake.’ I took a deep breath. ‘Tell them I’ve gone to Copenhagen.’
‘But you haven’t gone yet.’ His chubby face was screwed up in puzzlement.
‘Tell them I’m going soon. No, don’t tell them anything.’
He shook his head, either in disgust or pity. ‘I don’t know what sort of shit you’re mixed up with, Ivan. You were always, I don’t know, odd.’
I gave him my best smile.
‘Listen man, I hope things turn out all right for you in Copenhagen, if that’s where you’re really going.’ He turned to go. I watched his broad back, saw the others waiting at the bottom of the road. He stopped, put his hand to his forehead and turned round.
‘Oh yeah. One of them has a bad eye, looks out at an angle …’
I was gone before he was finished.
My clandestine lodger didn’t seem worried by my story, insisting that I calm down. This was probably why he was a cadre, because of his ability to think under pressure. He asked me to concentrate: did Nabil know where I lived? No, he’d never been here, but could have followed me after the drop. No, if he’d known where I lived they would have been here already, why bother going to the AUB? What would my classmates tell them? Nothing useful. They didn’t know I was here. Who did know you were here? Could Nabil have got to any of them and tracked you that way? I didn’t think so, he didn’t know who my acquaintances were, I didn’t think. We worked through the possibilities. The cadre needed to get a message to Najwa. I left him to write something down, went to the kitchen where I saw he’d done all the washing up, cleared out the fridge, even washed the floor. His socks and underwear were hanging on a line he’d rigged across the kitchen. When I went back into the sitting room I saw that that too had been tidied, the coffee table had been cleared. I’d been too wired before to even notice when I’d come in. Something was missing from the table, apart, that was, from all the filled ashtrays and empty bottles. Empty bottles. That’s what was missing: my Chianti bottle, carefully sculpted over the summer, had disappeared from the table. He was still writing so I went back into the kitchen. There was a small balcony off the kitchen, big enough for two people to stand on, where he’d put all the bottles. They were all neatly arranged by colour. My bottle was there, but had been stripped of its wax. I took it into the sitting room. My hands were shaking.
‘Why did you take the wax off my bottle?’ My voice was shaking too. He was putting his letter into an envelope and sealing it. I held the bottle up as evidence of his crime. He laughed, which made me shake even more.
‘What the hell is the matter with you, Ivan, are you ill?’ he said. ‘Do you know what is going on here? Calm yourself, man.’ He took the bottle from me and put it on the table. He put the envelope in my clammy hand. ‘Take this to Najwa and make sure you’re not followed.’
I didn’t move. He made a fist and pounded the table. ‘Damn you, man, act like your father’s son and pull yourself together.’ He took off his large-framed glasses, rubbed his eyes for a long while then looked at me. His eyes looked smaller without his glasses. ‘Forgive me, Ivan. I’m tired.’ The guy’s troubles were greater than mine. ‘Are you going to be OK?’ he asked.
I nodded.
‘Good man,’ he said.
I took a long route to Najwa’s, stopping at Samir’s place just to throw off anyone behind me as well as getting something to eat. Samir wasn’t there but Faris was, sitting at the table at the back with two of the men I’d seen him in here with before. They looked like they were having a meeting, judging by the serious expressions and haze of cigarette smoke. This time I left him to it; I had my own clandestine affairs to worry about. More and more I felt that I had no control of events unfolding around me, like I was floating helplessly down a river towards a waterfall. Faris joined me at the counter, where I was waiting for a fried vegetable sandwich.
‘Have you seen Samir?’ he asked. His jawbone was moving rhythmically under his shaved skin. His aftershave was fresh on.
‘No, not since last night. Why, what’s wrong?’
Faris just shook his head, told me to tell Samir, if I saw him, that he needed to talk to him. I sat at a small table looking out onto the street, watching the people walk by. ‘Act like your father’s son,’ the man had said. Here, everyone was their father’s son or daughter, known literally as son or daughter of so-and-so, and remained so until they had offspring of their own when they became father or mother of so-and-so. He’d managed to make me feel ashamed. Whenever I was told not to forget who my father was I knew I was being told that I didn’t measure up to him. I ate my sandwich and tried to concentrate on the present.
Najwa was surprised to see me, and didn’t look that pleased, although to her credit she covered it up well. Not quickly enough that I didn’t see her glance over my shoulder to see if I was alone, that I hadn’t led Nabil and his cronies to her. I gave her the letter and went out onto the balcony to sit at the table. I smoked a cigarette and looked out to east Beirut until she called. Abu Hisham was there, still in his pyjamas. He must have been in the bedroom when I’d arrived. We went over the same ground I’d been over with my lodger; I couldn’t find anything to tie Nabil back to my apartment.
‘Just to be safe we should move him out,’ Abu Hisham said. ‘His classmates can tie Ivan back to his street, so we should assume that the dog Nabil will do the same.’
‘Maybe it’s safer to leave him where he is,’ said Najwa. ‘Since they could be watching the street, they could spot him leaving.’
‘No, it’ll only be a matter of time before they find the right building. There are enough people with a grudge against us to provide this information for nothing, never mind if they start waving money about.’
They put together a plan for evacuating the lodger. Other things needed to be organised, not least where he was to go next and who was to take him in. I wasn’t privy to this part of the conversation but was sent back to explain the plan to the cadre, as he was to leave late that night. I walked past the entrance to my apartment building twice: the first time I was suspicious of someone standing inside the entrance (who turned out to be a resident waiting for an elderly relative to descend the stairs) and the second time I was spooked by someone sitting in a car on the opposite side of the road (who was subsequently joined by his wife and kids for whom he was waiting). Realising that I was probably attracting more attention walking up and down outside t
he building I darted inside.
Later that afternoon I couldn’t find Bob in the TeleNews offices so I headed across the road to the Commodore. The lobby was full of Lebanese drivers waiting to transport their journalists to film the departure of the French paratroopers, the last of the multinational force to leave. He wasn’t there either so I went to the bar where I found Stacy, sitting at her table with her yellow pad and menthols. I went and sat down opposite her. She looked genuinely pleased to see me, her smile like an injection of good feeling. The smile quickly disappeared, however, when I asked about Bob.
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