Between Beirut and the Moon

by A. Naji Bakhti

  ‘Waste some time while we wait for the referee’s whistle,’ said Mohammad.

  I thought it was a good line, because I was in that frame of mind.

  Mr Abu Alam read the article, allowed himself a half-smile, and said, ‘I didn’t think you had it in you.’

  Ms Mayssa led a round of applause in class. She talked about the importance of believing in oneself and to keep pushing ourselves so that we may one day achieve our dreams. She said the Don would be proud. She didn’t read it.

  Ms Katrina asked me to give her the newspaper. I did. She read the article out loud then cut it out in the shape of a triangle and pinned it to the board.

  ‘Isosceles,’ said Mohammad.

  Ms Katrina crossed her legs.

  Ms Iman nodded her head in my direction during break, which she did not normally do.

  Mr Aston asked me to translate the article for him. He said he hoped that he had played some small part in this. I said he had. He said he would like to take this opportunity to thank the class for making him feel at home. Truly, at home, he said. I said he was welcome.

  ‘Terrible title,’ said Mr Malik, spotting the triangle-shaped article pinned to the board.

  ‘The editors chose it,’ I said.

  ‘Najjar,’ said Mr Malik, ‘the boy of the hour. Your turn to recite.’

  I walked to the front of the class. I was not aware who the poet was for this week. I looked at my article behind me. Mr Malik tapped his pen against his desk.

  Write down!

  I am an Arab

  And my identity card number is fifty thousand

  I have eight children

  And the ninth will come after a summer

  Will you be angry?’

  It was the only poem I could think of under pressure. I spoke the defiant words of the Palestinian poet, Darwiche, which had remained pinned to the board in Mr Malik’s office behind the round teacher’s desk, far away from the hardened eyes of any Israeli soldier.

  ‘Palestine is lost,’ said Mr Malik, swinging his hand back as if to slap me, ‘God help all Arabs if you lot are the future.’

  Basil laughed for the first time that day. When the bell rang, Mr Malik called Basil over and they walked to the Arabic teacher’s office together. They appeared to be engaged in a heated debate. Basil was gesturing in exaggerated fashion towards the heavens and Mr Malik was almost imploring him to maintain his composure. Mr Malik pointed to his own forehead then placed his index finger on Basil’s forehead. As they turned the corner, Mohammad made the observation that Basil was hobbling as if he too had the legs of a maths compass. This was not entirely true but I did not deny it or leap to Basil’s defense.

  Several years later, Mr Malik was asked by one boy in another class if he still had his sniper gun. He said he did. Then he was asked, as a follow-up, whether he still rides his motorcycle from the war days. He said he didn’t but that he did ride the boy’s mother. He was sacked on the same day. The truth is that he would have gotten away with it, but the boy happened to be the son of a member of parliament and his mother, the wife of a member of parliament. Mr Malik would have known this.

  One Sunday in April, Estelle knocked on the door. My mother opened the door. She called my name. I stood on the doorstep. And Estelle stood on the doormat. I didn’t ask her to come in. The house smelled of stuffed zucchini.

  ‘Maman found a better job in Paris,’ said Estelle, ‘she wants us to move there.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Tomorrow morning. I’ve never been to Paris.’

  ‘Do you think you’ll like it more than Beirut?’

  ‘It is Paris. If I don’t, there’s something wrong with me.’

  I nodded.

  ‘What about your father?’

  ‘Maman says we were never here to find him,’ said Estelle, and she told me I was naïve with her eyes. ‘I think she just wanted me to carry something of this part of the world with me.’

  I nodded.

  ‘When you said Shawki, in the essay, you meant the Don. Didn’t you?’

  ‘Will you come back home?’

  ‘Who knows? Maybe. Yes. I will.’

  Estelle wiped a tear off her face.

  ‘When I die, cry over my dead body.’

  ‘That’s stupid,’ she said, ‘don’t say stupid things. It doesn’t suit you.’

  I didn’t apologise for the article or my outburst. She didn’t ask me to. We hadn’t spoken for months. She winked at me and opened her arms. I leaned in, she pinched me on the back of my neck. I smelled her. Not Chanel or Dior, just Ariel, maybe Persil and Garnier Fructis. Not like Basil. Estelle once said that he was so olive-skinned, you could taste the olives. He did smell of olives, with a hint of Labneh and some mint and a dash of thyme and sweat.

  ‘I’ll let you know if I ever spot your father walking down Hamra Street.’

  She laughed and I never saw her again.

  I would come across five or six men who looked like her father in Beirut. I spotted one in Verdun. He was tall and imposing and he wore a leather coat that extended to his knees. I spotted one on Rawche. He was wearing flip-flops and pink shorts and he too was tall, but much skinnier and less imposing. I spotted one on Mar Elias. He wore a suit, not tailored. It was loose and his tie was longer than it should have been. He had a face with no clear outline. I saw one on Mar Mkhael. He was young, younger than the man in the photo would have been at the time. He was drunk and ungroomed. Then I stopped looking.

  THE REVOLUTION

  In Mr Aston’s class, I explained that Estelle had left for Paris. Mr Aston said that he had not been informed of this. He made a note of it on the attendance sheet in front of him. Mohammad said that I should follow her. Basil said he had known about it. He leaned in closer to my desk and asked me if I had patched things up with Estelle. I shrugged. Mr Aston turned to Mohammad and told him to shut the window because of the racket outside. It was Friday and afternoon Azan was at its loudest. Mohammad froze. He looked like a goat caught in headlights. Mohammad was the only boy in class who had any facial hair. He had managed to squeeze out a goatee and keep it there for weeks. Basil too could grow something of a moustache but he had chosen not to. Mohammad reached for the window but did not shut it.

  Opposite the school stood a mosque and adjacent to the mosque stood a church. Every so often, when the Azan rang throughout the streets of Beirut, the church would join in by ringing its bells. The other teachers cited this as an example of the pluralism of Beirut. And the first few times you heard that sound, it was. But only the first few times.

  ‘Mohammad, we haven’t got all day,’ said Mr Aston, ‘we’re covering Gatsby and the American Dream today.’

  Nadine looked at Mohammad. Wael looked at Mohammad. And I imagine if Estelle were there, she would have surveyed Mohammad with interest too. Mr Aston, who had been leaning against the teacher’s desk, and supporting his weight with his knuckles, straightened his back. Basil got up and shut the window. It was one of those old roll-up windows which had been painted and repainted. The glass bore the effects of the sloppy paint jobs over the years, a white stain here which had turned yellow or a splash of dried paint there with the marks of fingernails running through it. Some long ago student had attempted to reverse the damage done by the reckless painters with their fingernails, but childhood dreams and maths lessons had no doubt stood in the way. The rope upon which the entire operation depended was also visible. Basil had only to give the window a little push and the rope took care of the rest.

  Mr Aston gave Basil a nod. The Englishman had walked halfway across the classroom with the intention of shutting the window himself, possibly realising that he had asked too much of the class. For the next hour or so, he talked about Gatsby’s green light which ‘year by year recedes before us’. Mr Aston’s passion shone through, he slammed his fists, he clapped his hands, and pointed and wagged his index finger in equal measure. And even as he did so, there was something resigned about his voice which the
odd flicker of the eyelids betrayed. I was not, at the time, in the habit of observing too many world leaders in the midst of their stirring speeches. Though I imagined that they must not have sounded too different to Mr Aston’s that day. The only speech which I could recall was Saddam Hussein’s during his trial in court, not long before he was sentenced to death.

  ‘I am not here to defend me,’ the vicious dictator had said, pointing his index finger in the direction of the judge, ‘I am here to defend you.’

  Mr Aston’s glimmering blue eyes alternated between Mohammad and Basil for the duration of the session. When he was done, Mr Aston let his head drop. Basil and Mohammad exchanged glances.

  Twelve minutes before the end of class, we heard a bomb go off. It felt closer than it was. The glass from the three windows shattered and Serene sustained a cut on her forearm. Wael stood on his seat, flailing his arms in the process, and the rest of us ducked and covered our heads with our arMs Serene was stunned silent. She gasped at first but she did not cry or shout afterwards. Even her eyebrows had seemed to fail her, flickering inauspiciously then flatlining.

  ‘It’s a bomb, habibi, not a mouse,’ said Basil, craning his head more than usual to look up at Wael, ‘get down from there.’

  The politician, and member of parliament, targeted by the car bomb would survive the incident. He would need a walking stick for the remainder of his life, but he would use that stick as a political tool with which to beat his opponents.

  Mr Aston, however, did not handle the car bomb as well as the intended target. He swore loudly then he apologised profusely, then he gestured for the class to remain calm. Moments later, the class door swung open and slammed against one boy’s desk. Mr Aston swore again. The boy’s name was Ali and, sensing the opportunity, he swore too.

  ‘Damn the father of that pimp’s whore of a bomb,’ said Ali.

  Ms Iman’s head appeared through the door as she scanned the room for any injuries. Ignoring both Ali and Mr Aston, she spotted Serene and led her out of the room with one arm around her shoulder.

  Mohammad sat upright and eyed Basil. There was such an air of smugness about the former, that when Nadine coughed suddenly, I concluded that she must have choked on it.

  ‘I don’t blame you,’ said Mohammad the next day after class, running his fingers over his goatee.

  ‘For what?’ asked Basil.

  ‘Shutting the window.’

  ‘Why would you blame me for that?’

  ‘You saw what happened. The bomb, the shattered glass, the gash in Serene’s arm.’

  ‘You’re blaming me for not predicting the future,’ said Basil, looking at me and not Mohammad, in disbelief.

  We could hear some of the older boys playing football on the makeshift asphalt pitch behind us, and the voice of a short, skinny Egyptian boy who had recently moved to Beirut with his Christian parents. They had found Egypt a bit stifling and chose Lebanon as their place of refuge. Abed was not very good at the sport itself, but had a deceptively deep, strong voice coupled with an Egyptian dialect and was allowed to commentate on the match.

  In the late nineties, an Egyptian football commentator by trade, Methat Shalabi, captured the spirit of the World Cup for the Arab-speaking nations. His voice rang throughout the city like Azan, as everyone in Beirut tuned in to listen to Methat Shalabi commentate on France’s annihilation of Brazil in the ’98 final. Brazil’s capitulation, France’s dominance, Ronaldo’s despair and Zidane’s Marseilles roulette. Shalabi immortalized them all.

  ‘That Algerian boy can play,’ he would say about the star of the French national team. ‘Give him back, Chirac.’

  Abed stood in the middle of the makeshift pitch and the older boys just played around him. Pretty soon he found himself a loudspeaker and his voice became synonymous with school breaks. He had memorised the name and age of every single boy, and even seemed to know strange, intimate matters about some of them. On one occasion, he debated the merits of one father’s decision to take a second wife and whether polygamy is justified in today’s world. The goalkeeper, whose father had recently ventured into polygamy, dropped the ball and fluffed a clearance not long after that remark. The older boys accused Abed of being the son of an Egyptian intelligence officer and he did not deny it. So they let him speak his mind. He cleared his throat before mentioning the car bomb which had kept a significant number of players off the pitch because their mothers were reluctant to send him to school on the day.

  ‘We all love our mothers,’ said the Egyptian boy, ‘but sometimes they can be a little bit overbearing.’

  Now pitchside, Mohammad raised his voice even louder so that he could be heard above Abed.

  ‘You shut the window. It blocked out the Azan. The glass broke,’ said Mohammad. ‘You do the maths.’

  ‘So you’re saying God did it?’ asked Wael.

  ‘Yes,’ said Mohammad, running his fingers over his goatee, ‘but only because our Druze friend shut the window.’

  ‘I only shut it because you froze up,’ said Basil.

  ‘I didn’t freeze up. I could have done it if I wanted to.’

  ‘Habibi, you couldn’t have done shit.’

  ‘Who the hell is Aston to tell us whether or not we can listen to the Azan?’ said Wael.

  ‘You’re Christian, Wael,’ I said.

  ‘It’s the principle.’

  ‘Surely, that should have been a foul,’ rang Abed’s voice through the loudspeaker. ‘This sort of thing happens sometimes when there is no referee.’

  ‘Six hundred and twenty-seven times two hundred and sixty-five?’ asked Basil.

  ‘One hundred sixty-six thousand, one hundred and fifty-five.’

  ‘Who made you Druze minister of foreign affairs anyway?’ asked Mohammad.

  ‘I’m not defending him because he’s foreign, you dumb, ape-descendent, Muslim goat. I’m defending him because he’s not wrong.’

  ‘I’m the goat? Your mother worships goats. She prays for the goats to protect her son before she goes to bed, every night,’ said Mohammad, ‘and sometimes I answer her prayers.’

  Basil shrugged at this.

  ‘What do you do with that Child Molester in his office all the time anyway?’ asked Mohammad.

  ‘None of your business,’ replied Basil, clenching his fists.

  ‘That’s alright,’ said Mohammad, placing a hand on Basil’s shoulder, ‘we already know.’

  At this Basil launched his fist in the direction of Mohammad’s jaw. He missed and Mohammad landed an uppercut which knocked Basil off his feet and onto his back. I kneed Mohammad in the stomach but was dragged by the collar from behind before I could do anything else. I was on the floor and Wael had his hands around my throat. I thought about throwing him a particularly large equation to solve, but it seemed unlikely that maths was the answer. Someone caught Wael with an arm around his neck and lifted him off me. By the time I got to my feet, I could see boys from all over the playground at each other. The older boys had stopped their game of football and were exchanging blows indiscriminately.

  ‘Najjar is back to his feet and he scans the pitch for his next target,’ announced Abed, before adding, ‘Najjar’s father is, of course, Muslim and his mother, Christian. He thinks he might be a Buddhist.’

  The younger boys revelled in the chaos. One of them, a short curly-haired boy with severe dandruff, swung a fist in my direction. His thumb was tucked inside his fist. I shoved him out of the way.

  ‘Revolution!’ screamed Basil, fist in the air, rushing past me and leaping onto Mohammad who was now sprawled on the ground.

  A couple of young boys followed him into battle. One had black hair and black eyes and his nose so protruded from his face that it was almost ahead of Basil. I felt my elbow connect with a chest and I did not turn to see whose.

  ‘It is mayhem, ladies and gentlemen,’ said Abed, still standing in the middle of the pitch untouched, ‘this is not the game we know and love.’ Then, ‘Where has that round thing
gone off to?’

  A few of the girls joined in too, but they only pushed and scratched each other. Serene extended a leg to trip one of the younger boys. Once he was writhing on the floor, she jumped on top of his back and pulled at his fringe. I felt a hand on my shoulder from behind. I ducked and turned. It was Basil. He already had a noticeably swollen lip.

  ‘I made out with Estelle a couple of times before she left,’ he said, ‘we didn’t tell you because we thought you wouldn’t like it.’

  Later, he admitted that he only told me because he was afraid that Abed might announce it into his loudspeaker.

  I put my fist through his gut. He sat on the floor and I sat alongside him.

  Then we heard the Don’s whistle. The entire playground fell quiet. If anyone could come back from the dead, the Don could. We looked around and saw that it was Ms Katerina holding the whistle and surveying the playground from atop one of the green benches. The ground remained still and silent, except for Abed who had abandoned his loudspeaker and was juggling the ball in the centre, still unscathed.

  The Persian carpet, the Plaza Pharmacy calendar, the leather armchairs were unchanged. Basil held an icepack to his right cheekbone, his upper lip red and swollen. My neck was covered in Band-Aids. Wael had dug his fingernails into my neck while he was being dragged away. He and Mohammad had joined us too. Wael could only see out of his left eye. Mohammad had escaped lightly. He was bigger than most. Ms Iman sat behind her desk surrounded by Mr Abu Alam, Ms Katerina, Mr Malik and Abed. The Egyptian commentator was there on account of the fact that he was the only uninvolved, neutral party in the whole playground. Though his stay in Ms Iman’s office was short-lived.

  ‘He has to go,’ Mr Abu Alam said, arms crossed, ‘the Englishman has to go.’

  He was wearing shoes, not highlander sandals. He kept a pair of Clarks in his desk drawer for times like these. He did not have socks on.