‘I’m a doctor, not a businessman. I plan to examine my patients, not write prescriptions for drugs banned in Europe,’ said John.
‘OK, my friend, I was only saying.’ To me Samir said, ‘You know he’s taking Arabic lessons so he doesn’t need you any more.’
This was to be John’s new clinic, right in the heart of the camp. He no longer wanted to work in the hospital but was talking about being a step ahead, working with preventive medicine. He was tired of patients coming into the hospital demanding particular brands of pharmaceuticals. ‘Ask them’, he would tell me, ‘if they’ve been trained as a doctor.’ As ever, I resorted to selective translation. His partner in this new venture was Rima, a Palestinian paediatrician fresh from an American medical school. I’d only seen them together a couple of times, but they always seemed to be arguing about medical protocol. Rima had managed to raise the money for this place. In the wake of ‘the massacre’, as it was now called, all kinds of help had been arriving, including a whole new staff of volunteers at the hospital to replace those who had left. A new set of peacekeeping soldiers had arrived as well, since the Israelis had withdrawn to the outskirts again, their job done. John, however, didn’t think his job was done – as well as taking Arabic lessons he was looking for somewhere to live near the camp. Samir couldn’t understand this at all; why would anyone want to live like a refugee if they weren’t one themselves?
I had just come from speaking to my grandmother for the second time and I needed to speak to John. He was busy giving instructions through Samir to a group of volunteers (mainly elderly women) who had turned up to clean out the rooms. I took his elbow while Samir was giving orders, trying to keep his clothes clean at the same time.
‘Asha was mentioned on the BBC World Service,’ John said. ‘She gave an interview in Cyprus, on her way to Paris. People are just waking up to what’s happened.’ He clapped the dust from his hands, took his glasses off to rub his eyes.
‘I need to talk to you about Youssef,’ I said.
‘OK.’ He shrugged, cleaning the lenses of his glasses with his shirt. We watched Samir digging something from the wall with one of his keys, presumably belonging to a car he no longer drove. I turned to John.
‘My grandmother knows a plastic surgeon in Copenhagen who can operate on Youssef. In principle, that is. He’s an old friend of hers. The hospital needs his medical records, though. I could only give her a brief description. She’s also contacted a charity that will pay for his flight and somewhere to stay but they need some details as well.’
John smiled at me, put his glasses back on. ‘Calm down, Ivan. Tell me what you need. But slowly.’
I took a breath.
‘Here we go,’ Samir said, holding up a deformed bullet between forefinger and thumb, a triumphant grin on his face. ‘Kalashnikov,’ he said.
I had decided, before coming to Najwa’s, not to tell her about Youssef. I sat across from her at the dining table, sipping coffee and fiddling with my lighter. We were inside because of the heavy rain. This was the second time I’d seen her since the slaughter; the first we’d spent on her balcony looking out over the city, not talking much. She’d looked tired then, her limp more pronounced than usual. This time she brought up what she’d failed to before.
‘Ivan, why didn’t you tell me that you never delivered the passports?’ She sounded hurt. My face reddened; it was obvious that she would have found out they hadn’t been delivered, yet I’d said nothing at our last meeting. I took a cigarette out of her pack on the table.
‘After the massacre I thought nothing would be the same,’ I said. ‘Nothing seemed to matter any more. I didn’t think life would carry on as normal, that people would just go back to work or school. I didn’t understand how it was possible to carry on as if nothing had happened.’ I studied my unlit cigarette.
‘Everything has to carry on, Ivan. You can either lie down and die or you can carry on. It’s a choice you make.’
I nodded. I’d believed that anything pre-Sabra would be nullified, the slate wiped clean. But it hadn’t been like that. University lectures had started on time, without me. People cooked and ate, had sex, drank, laughed, went to the cinema, made conversation about trivial things. As Najwa said, they carried on. Samir had carried on opening his new café. John and Asha had carried on, even though their paths had been altered by what happened. Asha now had a new purpose and so did John, with his clinic. Najwa was carrying on because she believed that you should redouble your efforts every time you have a setback. Even the survivors in the camp carried on, those that had seen it happen, watched their relatives and neighbours being slaughtered. They were rebuilding their homes, clearing the streets and opening their little shops. I put the unlit cigarette back in its case and picked up my lighter again, flicking it to make sparks.
‘I’ve arranged for this kid, a survivor from the camp, to go to Copenhagen for treatment,’ I said. I put the lighter down and looked up. ‘I’m planning to go with him.’
She puckered her lips and I endured an awkward silence. It was worse than if she’d told me it was only to be expected, that they’d known all along I was shallow and unreliable.
Eventually she said, ‘I understand. He’s your ticket out of here. You think that by choosing to help an individual you can be absolved from the collective struggle. The harder battle is helping everyone, coming up with a solution to the cause of injustice, not just fixing the symptoms.’ She leant back and looked through the rain-streaked window. ‘Your father understands this.’
I stood up. ‘Well, I’m not my father.’ I walked to the door and turned to look at Najwa once more. ‘He’s probably right, my father, but you have to start somewhere, don’t you?’
Her mouth formed a little smile.
‘The boy’s name is Youssef,’ I told her.
23
The smell hit me as I woke – sweet and cloying. I opened my eyes to see an SAS stewardess, her manicured hands placing a tray of food in front of me, giving me the lipstick smile she gave everyone. She had to lean over Youssef in the aisle seat and he nudged me as she left to attend the next row.
‘Danish women smell nice,’ he said in Arabic.
‘She’s Swedish,’ I said.
‘They all look the same to me.’ He stretched out his cleanly bandaged foot, taking advantage of the extra legroom I’d asked for next to the emergency exit. He tried to make sense of the compartmentalised food on his tray. I looked past the Danish man on my left through the oval window to see the Mediterranean sea beneath us. A tiny shipping tanker sat on the surface but soon disappeared from view. We banked to the right and the sea was replaced by sky, making my stomach lurch. The captain told us we were turning over Sicily, to begin our journey high over Europe before descending to Copenhagen.
I leant back in my seat and closed my eyes. Samir, John and Rima had seen us off at the airport. John and Rima were spending a lot more time together and I could see that their earlier jousting was just a prelude to the real relationship they were now embarking on. I imagined them driving back up the coast road to the camp, Samir working the wheel and gears of his yellow Mercedes like a man infatuated. Last week John had written out a medical report for Youssef, which I got the Danish consulate in east Beirut to fax to the Copenhagen charity funding his treatment. I also left them with a Lebanese passport for Youssef that Samir had hastily sorted out. I didn’t know if it was genuine but it cost me most of the money Eli had sent. A few days later a bemused official at the consulate had given me a visa and tickets for Youssef and myself, mine paid for by my grandmother, his by the charity. And here we were, hurtling at 500 kilometres an hour towards a completely different world.
‘Make sure he comes back,’ was the last thing John said at the airport, pointing to Youssef. ‘This is where he belongs. It’s his home.’
Youssef was eating his dessert and main course together, taking alternate bites out of each. My grandmother would take to him, I was sure; she preferred childr
en’s company to that of adults.
The man next to me opened an International Herald Tribune, blocking my view of the window. The front page referred to an impending inquiry in Israel into what happened in Sabra and Shatila while the IDF had been in control of the city, although nobody in Beirut believed they would shoulder any blame. On the inside page was a small picture of Asha being interviewed in Paris; her first stop in a tour of European cities where she planned to educate the world, as she put it, through talks and interviews, giving her account of what happened in the camp. She was also planning to write a book. Her charity had dropped her because, in their view, she had become too political for them, their status compromised by her forthright views on the massacre and who was responsible. Charity people weren’t allowed to take sides, they had to be balanced, she was told. John said that being balanced was a sham, that if you could see both sides equally then you were missing some vital fact. The stewardess returned to pour coffee. I declined, finishing the vodka from the miniature.
Youssef examined the small sachet with the moist towelette inside, asking me if it was food. I was going to have to explain a lot of things to him, a lot of trivial and meaningless things that didn’t matter in his world and shouldn’t matter in anyone’s. He wouldn’t elaborate on what had happened in the hospital before he was evacuated and I didn’t press him, just as I didn’t like to be pressed. Youssef, who’d suffered many times more than I could imagine, had less laughter than before, a new wariness in his eyes, a tendency to flinch at loud voices. I was glad to be getting out. It did feel like an escape, but I also felt like I was abandoning people. This went beyond my failed duty to the ‘cause’; it was like leaving horribly injured people at the scene of an appalling accident in the futile hope that if you couldn’t see it then it wouldn’t bother you. The trouble was this: I would always see it; the pictures were branded onto my retinas, the smell embedded in the soft lining inside my nose. Maybe Najwa was right, maybe Youssef was my way out of the broken city behind us. But Youssef was much more than that. It occurred to me (and here was a foolish notion) that my parents could adopt him and in doing so would heal their broken marriage.
‘What’re you laughing at?’ asked Youssef.
‘Was I laughing?’
The rattle of the drinks trolley was a welcome distraction. I asked for another vodka and some ice from the stewardess and handed over my two empty miniatures. I didn’t get any peanuts this time round, just a less impersonal smile (I liked to think) than before. The Dane to my left had turned the page of the newspaper and I caught sight of a headline with Bob’s name in it. I tried to read the article but the newspaper was moving. The man folded it up and handed it to me, smiling.
‘Maybe you’d like to read it? I’ve finished,’ he said.
My eyes pricked at this tiny act of kindness. It was strange, lately the smallest sentiment brought me to tears. From the newspaper I learnt that Bob had won an award – something that cameramen give to other cameramen – for his footage of the massacre. Bob was quoted in the piece as saying that ‘it is ironic that the footage in question cannot be shown on television due to its graphic nature’.
Youssef had discovered the button that reclined his seat and was seeing how far back it would go. With it all the way back I could see a middle-aged Lebanese woman behind, her make-up over-applied, a large gold cross at her throat. She glared at me and asked if I couldn’t control ‘the boy’. I turned away, pressing Youssef’s seat button so that he was propelled upright and the woman disappeared from view.
‘Aren’t you going to eat that?’ he asked, pointing at my unopened food.
‘No, you can have it.’
I took a big mouthful of cold vodka, holding the liquid in my mouth as long as I could before swallowing. It numbed my tongue and burnt my throat.
Read more by Mischa Hiller
SHAKE OFF
London 1989: Michel is an undercover PLO operative posing as a student. He is tasked by mentor Abu Leila to find a venue for secret Palestinian–Israeli talks. But fellow student Helen is proving to be a distraction.
Michel is forced to go on the run when he takes possession of a package smuggled out of the Occupied Territories and linked to an assassination in Berlin – a package that both the Israelis and the Palestinians are desperate to get hold of.
From the streets of London and Berlin, to the remotest areas of Scotland, Michel must use his KGB training and Helen’s help to shake off his pursuers and stay one step ahead.
‘A clever thriller.’ Independent
‘Poignant and human – Mr Hiller’s Shake Off is hard to shake off.’ The Economist
‘Hiller recalls the cool detachment and compelling eye for the ordinary detail that characterised the early thrillers of Graham Greene.’ Independent on Sunday
‘Melancholy and dreamlike, Hiller’s neat upending of conventions movingly captures the realpolitik of a conflict perpetuated by the shared interests of enemies.’ Telegraph
‘In the best le Carré tradition … Hiller brings to his works not only a craftsman’s skill but also a compassion for his characters that proves infectious.’ Haaretz
MISCHA HILLER, of English-Palestinian descent, was born in England in 1962 and grew up in London, Dar es Salaam and Beirut. Sabra Zoo won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Book in the Europe and South Asia category in 2011. Mischa also won the 2009 European Independent Film Festival script competition for his adaptation of the book. His second novel, Shake Off, was published to critical acclaim in 2011. He lives with his family in Cambridge.
www.mischahiller.com
Praise for Sabra Zoo
‘It is a tremendous accomplishment to turn the messy and horrific events of the Lebanese civil war and the massacre of Sabra and Shatila into a work of art. Mischa Hiller succeeds in weaving a remarkable novel that is told by an eighteen year old narrator who doubtless will rank high amongst the great characters in world literature.’ Raja Shehadeh
‘Beautifully told, ambitious and important, this is a debut with something to say.’ Ronan Bennett
‘Time seems suspended; senses are heightened. Worldly-wise though innocent, Ivan is drawn to older Norwegian physiotherapist Eli and enraged orphan Youssef; just two of the exhausted, impassioned characters in Hiller’s stunning, defiant debut.’ Guardian First Novels Roundup
‘A chilling rites-of-passage novel set in Beirut in 1982 during the killings in the camps.’ The Economist
‘Hiller brings to his works not only a craftsman’s skill but also a compassion for his characters that proves infectious.’ Haaretz
‘This darkly humorous, often harrowing novel demonstrates that in the chaos of conflict there are no easy or obvious decisions.’ Metro
‘In its memorialising of the 1982 massacres, Hiller’s fiction joins great Arabic novels such as Love in Exile by Bahaa Taher … and Elias Khoury’s Gate of the Sun.’ Guardian
‘A moving debut … Hauntingly written, with a wonderful touch for human feelings … If Hiller can reproduce its beauty and strength he will be a name to conjure with.’ Daily Mail
‘[An] impressive Bildungsroman … Hiller’s evocation of the war through a teenager’s eyes gives this novel both depth and gravitas … This novel reminds us that even the chaos of war can’t thwart the complexities of the human spirit and the mysteries of love.’ Literary Review
‘In Sabra Zoo, a fresh, new, translucent voice narrates post-invasion Beirut, adding a personal dimension to realistic portrayal of actual events.’ Jordan Times
‘A searing and accomplished novel … Hiller delineates his characters with skill, and the dialogue is expertly pitched.’ Saudi Gazette
‘Massacres usually don’t make enjoyable reads. Yet, in Sabra Zoo, a compelling storyline is set against the terror-filled backdrop of one of the Middle East’s worst slaughters in recent history.’ Esquire Middle East
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