Between Beirut and the Moon

by A. Naji Bakhti

  ‘I cannot believe that you are reading. Your son is going to ruin his life,’ she said, still standing.

  My mother had steadily developed a deceptive standing posture mimicking a bent over seated position, not a crouch exactly, which she called upon in times of crisis to subtly emphasize an otherwise verbal point. She also slapped her thighs.

  ‘He can do whatever he wants with his life,’ said my father, now unfolding his newspaper which had been tucked under his arm up to that point.

  ‘You’re going to sit there and read your own article?’

  She slapped her thighs again.

  ‘What can I do? “Your children are not yours, they are the sons and daughters of life’s longing for itself.” Gibran Khalil Gibran,’ said my father, his face hidden behind the newspaper.

  I clenched my jaw.

  ‘He almost got his genitals chopped off.’

  ‘It’s all part of his grand plan. Somehow this is all part of the road to becoming an astronaut. Isn’t it, son? That’s why he punches people, lashes his sister with my belt, and has sex in public toilets,’ he said, peeking his head above the newspaper to glare at me.

  ‘Pretend-sex,’ I said.

  ‘Jesus-Mohammad-Christ, I wouldn’t boast about that if I were you. And don’t interrupt me when I’m ranting,’ he said. ‘He’s plotting his way to space. That was my point.’

  ‘I’m plotting my way to space,’ I said.

  ‘Not everything is a joke,’ said my mother.

  My father got up and walked to the dinner table. He grabbed a book and threw it in my direction. It was entitled Steps in Space. He had folded one page down the middle. I opened the book to that page as I dropped back into the comfortable couch.

  Printed there were the names of the twelve men who had made it to the moon.

  ‘Do you understand?’ he said.

  ‘Understand what?’

  ‘Read the names aloud.’

  ‘Armstrong, Aldrin, Conrad, Bean, Shepard.’ I stopped and looked up at my mother.

  ‘Go on,’ barked my father.

  ‘Mitchell, Scott, Irwin, Young, Duke, Cernan, Schmitt.’

  ‘What do they all have in common?’ he asked, leaning in.

  ‘They’re all astronauts.’

  ‘They’re all American,’ said my father, and the edge of his mouth twitched. ‘Astronauts don’t ride to the moon on the back of rockets,’ he continued, ‘they ride to the moon on the back of nations.’

  ‘What’s that got to do with anything?’ asked my mother.

  ‘He needs to grow up. That’s his problem. Stop pretending. And grow up.’

  On these occasions, it occurred to me that my father might have believed in adulthood as a separate state of being, that he bought deeply into the notion that adults lead distinct lives from their childhood selves, that to grow is not to build on your childhood but to cast it aside in favour of the person you were always supposed to become. And this person was never an astronaut.

  ‘He can do anything he sets his mind to.’

  ‘No. That’s the problem. You’ve made him think he can walk on water and now he wants to walk on the moon,’ he said, pausing to scratch his moustache with such vigour that I was surprised it had not come off his upper lip altogether.

  ‘I don’t want to walk on water. I just want to walk on the moon,’ I said, slamming the book shut.

  ‘Become a teacher. And teach about going to the moon. Become a writer. Write about going to the moon.’

  ‘I don’t want to write about astronauts going to the moon. I want to be one.’

  ‘Write in first-person then.’

  Serene showed up to class a month later. Ramadan was over by then. Mr Aston had not been to any of his classes for a week. When Ms Iman said he had gone back to London, the general assumption was that he had passed away, like the Don. It turned out he had in fact left for Southampton. He had had enough of Beirut, packed his belongings and walked away. Ms Mayssa cried in the middle of another PowerPoint presentation, and Nadine placed an arm around her.

  Serene walked into Ms Katerina’s class late. She sat down and looked straight ahead. When Ms Katerina saw her, she stopped drawing the circle on the board. Then she looked around as if to make sure that no one in class scared Serene off. The room fell silent, except for the eternal hum of the overhead fan. Basil raised his hand.

  ‘Do you have a question, Basil?’ asked Ms Katerina.

  ‘Five hundred and twenty-five times one thousand six hundred and twenty-two?’

  ‘Eight hundred fifty-five thousand five hundred fifty-five,’ said Wael.

  ‘That is incorrect, I think,’ said Ms Katerina, taking out her calculator.

  ‘I was distracted,’ said Wael.

  Serene smiled in my direction, after class. Mohammad said I should go talk to her and Basil slipped a condom in my back pocket.

  ‘It is olive flavoured, found it in my father’s wallet,’ said Basil, before giving me a pat on the back. ‘He’s stopped smoking so now I’m stealing these instead.’

  I walked over to Serene, took her arm and walked her into the nearest empty classroom I could find. Outside, Wael was asking Basil if and when he thought his father would resume smoking because he was considering indulging in a cigarette or two himself but was conscious about smoking his allowance away.

  ‘They’re dirt cheap,’ said Basil.

  I shut the classroom door. Chairs stacked on top of desks leaned heavily against the smeared walls and towered above broken overhead projectors which littered the floor. The lights were off and the room smelled of tuna sandwiches in aluminium foil and rotten, mouldy bananas. There was no whiteboard, and only one chalkboard. Pictures of famous men throughout history were taped to the walls featuring one of Einstein with his tongue out and another of Gandhi in his glasses and a Gibran Khalil Gibran self-portrait. There was also a picture of the former president and someone had given him a beard to go along with his moustache. And stapled, haphazardly, atop a picture of Stephen Hawking in his wheelchair was a recent one of Sabah.

  ‘Did he throw himself off the Rawche Rock?’ I asked.

  ‘The Don?’

  ‘The Englishman.’

  ‘No,’ she said, licking her lips, ‘not unless there is a Rawche Rock in Southampton.’

  ‘Where have you been?’ I asked, still holding on to Serene’s arm.

  ‘I wanted to contact you but I couldn’t,’ she said.

  I nodded. Serene’s face looked rounder but not fatter. I could still see her dimples but they were less pronounced and her eyebrows, too, seemed lighter.

  ‘Stop staring at them,’ she said, putting her hands over her eyebrows.

  ‘My friend gave me this,’ I said, taking the condom out of my back pocket, ‘it is olive flavoured.’

  Serene grabbed the condom from my hand, ripped open the green wrapper and threw it onto the floor.

  ‘It is lime flavored, your friend is an idiot,’ she said, ‘open your mouth.’

  I did and she placed the condom on my tongue. It tasted of rubber and lime.

  ‘Did they beat you?’ I asked, swishing the condom around in my mouth.

  ‘Don’t be silly. Would it worry you if I said they had?’ she asked, tracing her right eyebrow with her index finger and thumb.

  I nodded again. I surveyed the room: Shakespeare, Lincoln or Washington, Mahmoud Darwiche, Aristotle or Socrates or Plato, Dali and Mozart or Picasso and Beethoven, one of them was an artist and the other was a musician, Martin Luther King Jr., Pele with his right hand aloft, and Sabah. There was no Neil Armstrong or Yuri Gagarin.

  ‘What would you have done about it,’ she asked, ‘if I said that my father had beaten me?’

  ‘Beat someone up.’

  The condom had lost its flavour.

  ‘I heard you begged my brother not to beat you up,’ she said, laughing before quickly placing a hand over her mouth.

  I gazed out through the dusty window glass. There was a jasmine
tree not far off and a green gate and a brown cat having a stroll and not a Druze within sight.

  I spat the lime-flavoured condom onto the floor.

  She smiled and kissed me on the cheek. It was a small peck, nothing more. She smelled of sweat and the insides of a pencil case when you leave the pencil shavings in for too long.

  ‘You like to pretend you’re tough, don’t you?’

  She lifted her skirt to reveal her bluish-red upper thighs.

  ‘They did not want it to show,’ she said.

  And then after a pause, ‘Nor do I.’

  Basil and I went to the Shipman’s Crew that night. We drank two bottles of 961 each, not Almaza, then we gathered the empty bottles and walked out. Basil launched the first bottle through the window shattering the glass, then I did the same with the second bottle and so on. It was divine justice, said Basil, and we were only administering it because God did not exist. If the barman had only kept his mouth shut and not blabbed to Serene’s father then I would not have had to ponder the once imminent loss of my genitals. I would have been spared the indignity of being ‘rescued’ by Mr Malik and Serene would have been spared a beating.

  ‘You sons of bitches, you cowards, you Israeli pieces of shit,’ he shouted.

  ‘Fuck your 961 and your Lebanese hops and your fake ship,’ shouted Basil back hysterically, as we ran away, ‘it’s a bar, and you’re a barman. And we’re not at sea!’

  ‘And your coasters,’ I added, putting on the high-pitched crackling voice which Basil had employed earlier.

  ‘And your coasters,’ repeated Basil, ‘fuck them too.’

  The Captain chased us, at full speed, feet slamming against the ground, fists clenched, head held high and back arched forwards.

  ‘My hops were entrenched before the birth of time,’ I shouted upwards, catching my breath and looking firmly ahead, ‘before the opening of the eras, before the pines, and the olive trees and before the grass grew.’

  We ran past the Wimpy Café, except the sign now read Vero Moda, and you could not smell the rich Turkish coffee anymore. We ran past Piccadilly Cinema and a poster with the line ‘Roger Moore as James Bond in For Your Eyes Only’ which featured an enlarged pair of bare legs, a woman’s, spread wide with miniature Moore standing between them in a suit, pointing a gun and looking overwhelmed. We ran past a large portrait of Sabah drawn across the entire length of a building adorned in bullet holes on Hamra Street. She was young and blond and smiled down approvingly at passing cars, entirely unaware that she was a piece of art not life.

  We ran past a blur of thick, thin wires and naked wires, dancing from the roof of one shell-pocked building with its dried-up balcony plants and exterior, double foldable French wooden shutters onto the next shell-pocked building with its dried-up balcony plants and exterior, double foldable French wooden shutters and holes big enough for birds to build nests inside them; until we ran out of breath and the wires ran out of roof and so hung off the ledge of the last roof of the last building in Ras Beirut. And when we looked back we could not see the Captain and he could not see us and we did not know where to go from there because we thought he would get on his motorcycle and catch us or call the police or my father or Basil’s but he did not.

  Basil swung his olive-skinned and hairy arm around my neck, and laughed. He never wore a watch. He never asked me for the time of day nor accused me of tardiness except when he was in a foul mood and it suited him to do so. He slowed down his run and I slowed down mine then we sat on the edge of the pavement. I could feel a pain in my side and I breathed in the moist air of Hamra Street.

  ‘You should start shaving properly,’ he said. ‘Your face looks like a radish field.’

  He ran the back of his hand across my cheek and I swatted it away.

  Above us was one of those electric ad boards which had been installed by the mayor of Beirut after someone from the ad company had bribed him into doing so. It shined a light on the street and the pavement and several nearby residential apartments and their assorted laundry. The second or third ad displayed a cold bottle of Almaza in the sand with luggage resting beside it and the Mediterranean in the background, as it always was.

  ‘Open your doors,’ it read. ‘They’re coming back.’

  That summer Almaza ran an ad featuring teary-eyed mothers talking about their sons and daughters, working or studying abroad. It showed brothers missing their sisters, girlfriends pining for their boyfriends, or friends reminiscing about the absent member of the gang and how it was not the same without him. But it was alright because they were coming back in the summer, and they would all share an Almaza and that was fine. It was fine.

  ‘She’s over there in London freezing her ass off,’ said one girl, in her yellow bikini stretched out on the sand, ‘she belongs here with me.’

  ‘I miss you, son, don’t forget us,’ said one mother in the ad, ‘come back home, don’t deprive me of that face.’

  ‘He was just here,’ said the father, ‘he left five days ago.’

  Basil leant back and rested his weight on his elbows, like we were still at Ramlet Elbayda. He placed his hands beneath his back and thrust his hips forward. He looked like he was about to give birth.

  ‘If you had to worship one animal, though,’ he said, looking up at a tourism ad for some Far Eastern country featuring elephants, ‘just one. Which one would it be?’

  ‘The goat,’ I said, smiling.

  ‘I’m serious,’ said Basil, his eyes wide open, glued to the ad.

  I turned over all the farm animals in my head and none of them was majestic enough.

  ‘Apropos of nothing,’ continued Basil, sounding like Mr Malik, ‘it’s the calf not the goat that the Druze are meant to be worshipping. This goat business is a total fabrication. So is the calf nonsense.’

  I thought of the jungle, but I had never seen an elephant or a bear up close, nor did I aspire to. Also, from the pictures and images on TV, the elephant seemed to me too disinterested in the affairs of man, or anything else for that matter. For various, largely inexplicable, reasons, I would grow to dislike elephants deeply. Perhaps it is the way their trunks arch backwards when they bathe themselves in a pose reminiscent of a delicate wrist to a furrowed forehead or maybe it is the sound the trunk emits which deigns to scream for attention. They are arrogant, self-indulgent creatures, I reasoned, and I have no time for them. Insects I ruled out altogether on account of the fact that I could not bring myself to worship an animal whose entire survival was subject to a can of Bygon. Tigers and lions seemed too cruel, seals too sluggish and eagles too opportunistic. When at last I settled upon the whale because it is big and a rare sight, Basil had, like the elephant, lost interest.

  ‘You?’ I asked, locking my fingers and placing my elbows on my crouched knees. When Basil did not reply, I assumed that the conversation was over and with it the evening and so shifted my weight to one side and pressed the palm of my hand against the pavement in an attempt to stand up.

  ‘He’s having an affair,’ said Basil, staring ahead.

  His elbows had tired and he had leaned so far back that his head almost rested on the concrete pavers, but for his fingertips, which thinly prevented it from doing so.

  ‘Who?’ I asked, caught between sitting and standing.

  ‘The pimp. My father. I found a picture of her in his wallet. I meant to steal a condom and a few thousand liras. Now I think I should have left the condom.’

  I edged my body closer to his. He lifted his head and I slid down and placed my arm underneath it. We pretended to stare at the electric ad board which was no longer within our line of vision. There were no stars above and it was better to pretend that we were staring at something than nothing at all.

  ‘The goat,’ he said, and I did not ask him if he was serious. It was still dark when I returned home. The light had not yet snuck in through the grey, plastic shutters and bathed the dusty books. Basil and I spent most of the evening lying on the pavement and looking up a
t the ads. Almaza, Pantene, Ras El Abed, Garnier Fructis, Wassim’s Hair Salon. One of us would make an animal sound and the other would choke on his Almaza, and wait for his opportunity to exact revenge. There was no power, apart from the odd private generator in select buildings and ad boards. As I stumbled my way back home down the middle of the starlit, empty road, a couple of barren street lamps adjusted their posture momentarily and saluted my footsteps without lighting them. For the most part, they stood repentant by the side of the road. One of them leaned forward as if permanently on the verge of whispering a secret into the ear of an oncoming pedestrian.

  The Horse Shoe, a coffee house not a retailer for equestrian footwear, had shut its doors around midnight and left the cheap metal chairs and tables out on the pavement unguarded. I picked up one of the surprisingly light chairs and tossed it as far as I could, which was not very far at all. It tumbled, clanking its way across the street and into a stationary greyish-black Jeep. I am unsure whether it was the absence of Basil or the Captain, or the almost clumsy, awkward sound of hollow metal against asphalt – as opposed to that of glass shattering – but suddenly vandalism seemed altogether a less than satisfying endeavour.

  From the first-floor balcony of a dwarfed building which bore the strain of rain and wind, but also intense sun, hung a water-soaked cardboard sign. It read ‘Urgent: waitresses needed.’ An aging man with a gruff beard and two stumps for legs sat on a cardboard box beneath the house with the scarlet shutters and swung his stumps first left then right then around and back again. I waved to him as the soft rain began to descend on our heads alone. He coughed out phlegm and continued swinging his stumps. Sabah’s voice emanated from the brothel and rang through Hamra; she was most alive at night.

  I was greeted with a gust of smoke as I eased the door to the apartment open. I had expected to find a still and fragile silence. A single spot of light burned bright. I reached for it with my fingers but it appeared to fade as soon as I did so. I made my way blindly through the darkness and the undying fog of war towards the ethereal light. There I found my mother and her cigarette. I blinked and my eyes were both dry and wet. She did not acknowledge my presence at first. She looked through me, as if I were part of the fog which might blur her vision but not impede it.