‘Bob could be anywhere,’ she said. Her drawl was raspy from too many Kent Menthols. She retied her ponytail. ‘He could be anywhere in this hotel, or in any other hotel for that matter,’ she said with a short bark of a laugh.
I said nothing. I noticed a packed suitcase by her chair. She took a Kent from the packet and I managed to light it for her without setting fire to anything else. She arched her back and stretched her neck to blow smoke at the ceiling. This made her T-shirt tighten against her chest. When I raised my eyes she was looking at me and smiling.
‘How old are you, Ivan?’
‘Eighteen.’
‘Eighteen. You must have a girlfriend, right?’
I hesitated – did Eli count as a girlfriend?
‘I can’t believe a good-looking boy like you hasn’t got a girlfriend or two?’
I smiled but inwardly winced at the word ‘boy’. I knew that she wouldn’t say something like that if she thought of me as a serious proposition. Maybe she was right, maybe I was still a boy.
‘Don’t become like the rest of them, will you?’ she said, serious all of a sudden. She crossed her arms on the table and leant forward to look intensely into my eyes. I had to move my gaze to the table in embarrassment.
‘Naw, I don’t believe you will.’ She picked up her pen.
‘Bob’s a fool,’ I said, blushing as hard as I could.
She smiled and leant forward and I thought, hoped, she was going to kiss me. But she didn’t, she just tapped my fingers with her pencil.
‘Thank you, young man. Now go away, I have to file my final piece on this city in an hour.’
‘What’s it about?’ I asked, looking at her neat handwriting. I wasn’t genuinely interested but just wanted to prolong our conversation and make the people in the bar think there was something between us.
‘It’s about some Jewish women living in Sabra, who married Palestinians before 1948. They came with them in the exodus. I’ve managed to track six of them down.’
I stood up and pointed at the suitcase. ‘So where are you going?’
‘I’m flying home for a few days then I’m going to Nicaragua. It’s where the next story is.’
I wasn’t even sure where Nicaragua was but I wanted to go with her, carry her bag for her, sharpen her pencils, light her cigarettes. She smiled her devastating smile and waved me away. I never saw her again.
14
The cadre’s transfer went smoothly. The only awkward bit was when we had to wait inside the lobby to my building. I kept popping out onto the street to have a look for the car, a red Peugeot 405 driven by a man in a beret.
‘Relax, he’ll come,’ said the cadre.
‘He’s late,’ I said.
On my third foray onto the darkening street I spotted the car crawling down the road, the driver looking for the fast-food restaurant that was the agreed meeting place. The restaurant was two buildings down from where we were; hopefully far enough away from my place so that no association could be made by whoever was picking us up, but close enough so that the lodger didn’t have far to walk, which was a risk in itself. The Peugeot double-parked outside the restaurant. I went into the lobby.
‘He’s here. I’ll take your bag, you follow when I’m at the car,’ I said. I placed the bag on the back seat of the Peugeot and left the door open. The cadre slipped into the car, closed the door and wound down the window.
‘One moment, comrade,’ he said to the driver, before turning to me. ‘Thanks for your hospitality.’
‘It was nothing.’
‘Good man. You’ll fill your father’s shoes yet.’
Then he was gone.
Now I was in the Etoile lobby. I could see Samir in the bar but headed upstairs to Eli’s room. She was there with Liv and three other women I didn’t know. They were sitting round the Irish girl Fiona, who for some reason was wearing sunglasses, cradling a glass. The room reeked of whisky. They looked at me as I entered the room but nobody smiled or greeted me. I had interrupted something. I tried to dispel the awkwardness with a joke about Fiona looking like Jane Fonda, which she did a bit in the glasses. Nobody laughed though and I saw Eli trying to shoo me away with discreet movements of her hand and wide eyes. Fiona, however, raised her head to look at me, taking off her glasses. Her left eye was puffed and filled with blood with a blue and black ring under it like she hadn’t slept for years. Eli was mouthing ‘Samir’ to me as I backed out of the room feeling hated, like I’d done it myself. Now I knew why Faris was looking for Samir. What I didn’t understand was why Samir was here at the Etoile.
I went downstairs and saw him standing at the bar with two blond men. At a table with their backs to me were a couple of Arab men in leather jackets, watching Samir. As I approached the bar the blond men were smiling politely at an obscene joke Samir was telling. He laughed too loudly at the punch line, his gestures over the top. One of them spoke to the other in Swedish; they were probably with the Red Cross. I smiled at them, asked in pidgin Swedish if they wouldn’t mind if I talked to my friend here for a minute. They looked relieved at being able to go without causing offence.
‘What are you doing here? Do you know who’s upstairs?’ I said in Arabic to Samir.
‘Brigitte Bardot?’ He chortled into his whisky, avoiding eye contact.
Looking past Samir into the lobby I could see Faris. He was about to come in, then saw the two men sitting at the table. My gaze followed his and I saw they were looking at Samir and me with great interest. One of them nodded at me as if I knew him. Faris shook his head at me and pulled an angry face, pointing at Samir’s back. Then he bounded up the stairs, three steps at a time.
‘Let’s go to my place,’ I said to Samir in a low voice. ‘This is not a good place to get drunk.’ I took his elbow.
‘What’s your secret, Ivan?’ His voice was loud enough to stop the chatter in the bar for a few seconds. Without looking to check, I imagined the two men at the table nudging each other and taking out notebooks, giving each other the thumbs up. ‘What’s your secret with women?’ He must have been drunker than I thought. I led him towards the lobby. ‘They tell me I should be more like you,’ he said, although thankfully he was mumbling now.
‘Come home with me and I’ll tell you all I know about women. I have notes and pictures and everything,’ I said. I led him out of the bar, thinking he was the one who should be giving me advice about women. I suggested we walk back but he wouldn’t hear of it, insisting on going to his car. He was in no state to reason with.
Amazingly, Samir was transformed behind the wheel of his Mercedes. It was as if he could negate the effects of alcohol with the mechanics of driving. Besides, I was sure that he wouldn’t have let me drive even if I could; he could never tolerate being a passenger.
Ten minutes later we were inside the apartment and he collapsed on the sofa. I made coffee.
‘This is shit,’ he said, pulling a face. I had to agree with him. The coffee grounds were like fine sand and plastered the back of my throat. The caffeine still worked, though; I felt my heart knocking in response to its effects.
‘Why did you do that to Fiona? What happened?’ I asked.
Before he could answer someone thumped at the front door, too loud and prolonged to be friendly. Samir and I looked at each other. I was thinking of the two men in the Etoile bar; I’d been certain they hadn’t followed us out of the hotel.
‘Do you have a weapon here?’ he asked.
I pulled up a chair and got the Tokarev down from its hiding place and handed it to Samir, relieved that he was using it and not me. The only thing I’d used it against were rats – huge dirty things that roamed Fakhani like they owned it. Rat shooting was something Samir and I had done together before. The knocking resumed with more vehemence. The neighbours were going to wake up if it carried on. Samir looked incredulously at the Tokarev as he removed the safety and loaded a bullet into the breech.
‘Is this the same piece of shit that jams every third shot?
’ he asked.
I nodded.
He shook his head, disgusted. ‘Then let’s hope there are only two of them.’ He went to the hallway, steady on his feet, incredibly. I followed, feeling safer behind him than staying in the sitting room. He turned off the hall light and peered through the security peephole, pressing the muzzle of the automatic against the wooden door at chest height. I couldn’t see his expression to judge what he could see. To my surprise he whipped open the door wide. The landing outside was dark and I couldn’t see past Samir but heard a smack and a grunt and I had to step back to let him fall on his backside in front of me. Faris was revealed in the doorway, rubbing his clenched fist. He came in, silently closing the door behind him. He only had eyes for Samir, who was holding his face with one hand and the Tokarev with the other. Faris picked Samir up by the shirt and I stepped aside as he dragged him past me into the sitting room. He pulled him up onto the sofa so that he was slouched back where he was before he got up to answer the door. He stooped and stuck his face in front of Samir’s.
‘You hit a woman again and I’ll split you open lengthways,’ he said quietly, as if asking him to stop leaving his socks lying around. ‘Do you understand what I’m saying, you stupid shit?’
Samir nodded, tears streaming down his face.
Faris noticed the Tokarev in Samir’s hand for the first time. ‘What are you doing with that?’ Samir handed him the gun and Faris removed the magazine which he put on the table, then pulled back the breech to release the loaded bullet, which clattered onto the marble floor. He pointed the Tokarev at the wall and dry fired it, to make sure nothing was in the breech. He put it on the table. ‘You could’ve killed someone with that.’
‘There were some suspicious men at the Etoile bar, we were a little edgy,’ Samir said.
‘You were right to be. It was raided.’
‘Who by?’ Samir asked.
‘I didn’t wait to find out. I escaped through the girls’ window.’ He went into the kitchen, where I heard water running. I picked up the bullet from the floor and pressed it into the magazine, then slipped the cartridge back into the Tokarev. Faris was back with a wet tea towel. He gave it to Samir to dab his eye, which was starting to swell up.
‘How about some coffee?’ Faris asked, looking at me for the first time, as if I’d just appeared. He rubbed the knuckles on his right hand.
‘His coffee is shit,’ Samir said. ‘How about some whisky?’ He blew his nose into the tea towel and handed it to me. ‘A new one would be an act of human kindness.’
We played cards, Faris occasionally looking at Samir and shaking his head with a wry smile as if Samir were his hapless and less intelligent younger brother. For the first time I got a sense of how close they were. Several hands of cards, half a bottle of Johnny Walker and an ashtray full of stained filters later, Samir and Faris decided to leave. Samir went to the bathroom to check his eye while Faris put the cards away.
‘Why did you do that to Samir, couldn’t you have just talked to him?’ I asked Faris in a low voice.
He shrugged, making a cigarette jump from his soft pack of Marlboro by flicking his wrist. He lit it and checked the filter, looked me in the eye. ‘That’s what he should have done with Fiona. You should never hit a woman.’ He looked away and blinked frantically as if trying to get something out of his eyes; I’d never seen him so unsure but before I could question him further he asked, ‘Why are you still here, Ivan?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean you don’t need to be here, in this city. You have a foreign passport, no?’
‘Yes I do, but –’
‘Then you should be in Europe, studying. Did you know I went to the Sorbonne in Paris?’
‘For real? What did you study?’
‘International law,’ he said, smiling. ‘But seriously, Ivan, you have choices, you should consider them.’
Samir was back in the room. His right eye was now a dark red.
They left shortly after three in the morning and I considered going to bed, but I was too jazzed up. Instead, since the electricity was on, I picked out one of my mother’s opera records, one with a woman dressed as a gypsy on the cover. I sat all the way through it, at first as a test of perseverance, but after a while I was absorbed in the music. I could feel myself drifting off to sleep on the sofa as it began to get light outside.
Soon there was buzzing in my ears, like a bad-tempered mosquito. I swatted at the noise but it just got louder and turned into ringing. I woke on the sofa – it was the doorbell. The needle on the turntable was cutting a new groove into the end of the record. Eli was on the other side of the peephole. I opened up and she took in my hair and clothes.
‘Still asleep?’ she asked, coming in with a plastic bag. ‘I have breakfast.’ She held up the bag and my hunger hit me, catching up with me from the day before. I made tea while she fried eggs. I asked her why she wasn’t at work. She told me she’d taken the morning off.
‘I want to say goodbye to people before I go. I’m going to work this afternoon.’ We dipped the fresh bread in the salty yolks, sharing a plate. She let me mop the plate up. I gulped the hot tea and leant back into the sofa.
‘You were hungry,’ she said. We were sitting next to each other. She was wearing a perfume that she’d bought from a market stall in the camp and her braids had black ribbons in them. She sipped her tea. I was agonisingly aware of how close she was, of her jasmine scent.
‘How’s Fiona?’ I asked.
‘She’ll live.’
‘Did she say why it happened?’
‘Does it matter? It shouldn’t have happened.’
I told her about Faris and Samir; how Samir now had the same black eye as Fiona. She looked unconvinced.
‘Samir will probably lose his driving job with the Red Crescent,’ I said. I didn’t know why I was defending him. I just wanted everyone to get on, like before.
‘I’m not sure Fiona will make a complaint. Maybe if she sees him she’ll think they’re even.’ We smiled at the image of them meeting.
I sensed an edginess between us as we made small talk. It was like a physical tension that was waiting for the right trigger to snap and be released. I didn’t know what that trigger was or what to do. I was worried that it would go away, an unknown opportunity lost for ever, or that I would dispel it with the wrong word or gesture. But Eli knew what to do. She took my hand, got up and led me to the bedroom. I stood by the bed paralysed as she wound down the shutter, restricting the sunlight to narrow strips on the bedcover. Then she was undressing and helping me undress until we were standing naked before each other. She was looking me up and down and smiling at my erection which felt like it would explode and kill us both. She pulled me onto the bed and things were happening more quickly. She was guiding my hands and my mouth. My senses were overwhelmed by her smooth curves and smells and softness and whispers. I was immersed fully in the experience; nothing else in the universe mattered, nothing at all. Soon I could hear people crying out and something was welling deep in my pelvis. Then I got the flash I had before my fit and an explosion ripped through me, again and again. When I opened my eyes I was still alive and looking down at Eli to make sure she was OK. Her eyes were unfocused and she was breathing rapidly through her parted lips.
‘Next time,’ she said, her voice coming from somewhere deep in her chest, ‘we’ll try to take it more slowly.’ We lay next to each other for a minute, catching our breath. She started guiding my hand over her breasts and down her damp belly; ‘next time’ was happening now.
At some point we had lunch and at some point we shared a cold shower which served to rejuvenate us to try it all again. Now we were lying on our backs on the bed after an involuntary nap. Eli looked at her watch, the only thing she was wearing apart from her redundant wedding ring, which she took off and handed to me.
‘This may be useful,’ she said. ‘In case you need to sell it or something. It’s good quality.’
‘I wou
ld never sell it.’ I tried it on my fingers but it was either too big or too small so I laid it between her breasts and watched it rise and fall for a bit.
‘What are you going to do, Ivan?’
‘I’ll get a chain for it to wear round my neck,’ I told her, but I knew she wasn’t asking about that. She raised herself on one elbow to face me. I searched for the fallen ring in the crumpled sheet.
‘Seriously, Ivan.’
‘I don’t know – something will turn up.’
‘No, you can’t just wait for things to happen to you. Have you thought about going back to Denmark?’
I shrugged and pulled the sheet up over myself.
‘Do you have someone you can stay with? Where are your parents?’
I studied the light through the slats in the blind. It had faded to a grey that meant it must have clouded over or else it was getting late.
‘I can give you some money to buy a ticket – I have money.’
I knew then that something between us was lost that could not be recovered. She’d taken on a different persona, behaving like a concerned aunt rather than a lover, sounding like Faris with his questions. The doorbell went and I welcomed the opportunity to slip on my jeans and go down the hall. Liv was trying to look the wrong way through the peephole.
‘Is Eli here?’ she said, her face all serious. I nodded and she headed past me for the bedroom before I could say anything. I followed to find her sitting on the bed next to Eli, who had covered herself with the sheet. The room smelt of sex.
‘Have you heard the news?’ Liv asked. We looked at her. ‘There’s been a big explosion in east Beirut, at the Phalangist headquarters. They say that Bashir Gemayel has been killed.’
15
Samir was waiting in the car to take us to Sabra. Depending on which radio station you tuned into, Bashir had either definitely survived or definitely died. But by the time we got to the hospital it was clear that he had been killed, along with twenty-four other Phalangists, in an enormous explosion (even by Beirut standards) which had pulled down the building he was in.
Sabra Zoo Page 11
