Between Beirut and the Moon

by A. Naji Bakhti

  She did not ask me why I had just walked in or where I had been. She smiled a half smile and said that she had reminded herself of Yvonne. Yvonne was an elderly disabled woman who had lived across from my grandparents’ house and lost her teeth to age, and her children to war. She sat on her balcony and smoked her way through the night, and the rest of the war. The light from Yvonne’s eternal cigarette was a source of comfort to my mother who could see it through her bedroom window, even as the gunshots intensified.

  ‘There is a lake in Australia that turns pink,’ said my mother.

  On the couch beside her, cigarette buds rose to fill half the bottle of wine wedged between the Palestinian cross-stitch embroidered pillows.

  ‘Australia?’

  ‘And sand so white it makes the snow in the hilltops of Mount Lebanon look like soot.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘We should have left,’ stammered my mother, between one puff of her cigarette and the next.

  ‘Where to?’

  ‘We were very close,’ she said, ‘we were very close. After the first one then after the second one, then in a couple of years when they’re both older. Stubborn old goat.’

  Having had enough of goats, and other animal sounds, for one night, I began to retreat in the hope that my absence would go unnoticed.

  A rustle sounded from amongst the books. I swerved and squinted but could not make out any shapes, apart from those of the bookshelves and the books themselves.

  ‘Haneen?’ asked my mother, straining her neck.

  That is what my parents called one another when they thought we were not there or could not hear them. In the moment, I believe my mother thought I was not there or perhaps the smoke had become so dense that it shielded me from view once again.

  Lebanese terms of endearment included ‘hayete’ or ‘habibi’, which meant life or love respectively. But ‘haneen’ was different. It implied a nostalgia of some kind, a sorrowful longing, often for the past, but also for a person.

  There was no reply.

  According to my Teta Mary, she and my grandfather Nabil did not mind my father so much when he was their daughter’s Muslim suitor. They minded him somewhat more as her Muslim husband. Also, according to my Teta Mary, my grandfather was never going to go through with his threat to round a small battalion of Christian militiamen and storm the gates of my father’s fortress, which was not a fortress. It was the small apartment on the sixth floor of an old building in Ras Beirut, the very one my sister and I were later conceived and raised in. Though it was an undeniable truth that he had in fact managed to round a small battalion (of three) Christian militiamen in pursuit of my mother and father who had planned to meet and get married in Cypriot Nicosia. It had to be Nicosia because civil marriage did not, and does not, exist in Lebanon, which makes interfaith marriage a difficult prospect.

  My grandfather Nabil, who had battled a heart condition since his late forties, was a resourceful man. Barely a year before my parents eloped, my grandfather managed to pull off a minor miracle. He saved his only son from the clutches of the Christian Forces who had kidnapped the latter, having wrongly assumed that he was an undercover Muslim spy due to his frequent sojourns in West Beirut.

  This was the mid-eighties, in the heat of the civil war and my uncle had believed that his life, like that of many before him, was lost and he resigned himself to his fate. He said his Christian prayers (mainly ‘Our Father’), which the Christian Forces took to be an excessive commitment to the role, and asked for a drink of Arak. They brought him vodka and toasted his acting skills. The word ‘Hollywood’ was tossed about, and De Niro’s name was taken in vain. My uncle thought about his fiancée in East Beirut, a Christian girl who was already pregnant with his child. He dared not hope that my grandfather Nabil would appear in the underground prison and save him from certain death. But, on some level, he must have known that if the news of his son’s disappearance did not cause him an immediate heart attack, it would stir my grandfather into immediate action.

  It did. Not two months later, my grandfather barged into the underground cell with a small battalion of armed Muslim militiamen. To hear my grandfather Nabil tell it, he merely hitched a ride. They were going in there anyway, and my tentatively devout Christian grandfather followed them in swinging Teta Mary’s substantial white bra in the air. It was a sign of peace, a signal to the snipers that he was a family man not a fighting man. My drunk uncle was so distressed that he tried to claim that his name was Hussein and that he was in fact a Muslim spy, which perplexed the Muslim militiamen but not enough for them to actually put a bullet through his head before my bra-swinging grandfather could swoop in and whisk him away. My grandfather drove his son to the Beirut International Airport, which would later be renamed the Rafik Harriri Beirut International Airport, booked the first ticket to Dubai and from there to London, after the visa arrangements had been made. My uncle’s fiancée followed him not long after that and he never returned to Beirut, not even to attend my grandfather’s funeral.

  Which is why, when my then would-be father heard that my then would-rather-not-be grandfather Nabil was threatening to round up a small battalion of Christian militiamen, the former wiped his forehead and booked two tickets to Cyprus where he and my mother were officially married. Not to be outdone, my grandfather Nabil booked four tickets to Cyprus, one for himself and three for the Christian militiamen, who were glad to see Cyprus for the first time. One of them stayed in Cyprus permanently having confessed his love for a Cypriot girl named Sofia, and tzatziki. The other two, according to my grandfather, might as well have stayed in Cyprus for all the good they did. My grandfather, and his party of militiamen, camped out at the airport for close to three days. And with airport security being what it was at the time, there were little to no issues with the matter. Except for one security official, Sofia, who would now and then ask if the Middle Eastern gentlemen were going anywhere or whether they planned to spend their entire holiday at the airport.

  When my grandfather found out that my mother and father had managed to make their way to their scheduled airplane unnoticed, he sent word via Sofia that my mother was to make her way out of the plane across the runway and into Waiting Room C where she would be greeted and forgiven by her own father. He also sent an enclosed piece of paper in which he presented the alternative. To this day, I do not know what that alternative was. Neither my parents nor my grandmother ever disclosed the contents of that brief letter; and my grandfather never knowingly acknowledged its existence. He passed away when I was still only five or six and did not yet have the wherewithal to properly cross-examine him. Though I doubt that I would ever have. As I understand it, the letter contained, in my mother’s own words, some ‘heat-of-the-moment threat’.

  I remember hearing the full unbarred version of the story. Whenever I wrap my arms around my knees and tuck them into my chest tightly, I can hear my mother’s raspy voice, which by that point uncannily resembled my grandmother’s, and see my father’s uncomfortable stares and unsolicited intrusions as my sister and I crouched away hidden from the thunder and the RPG rockets and the Kalashnikovs. It was several years after the death of Monsieur Mermier. It was also the second time in six years that we had found ourselves hiding away.

  The story was told within a series of other stories, meant to distract my sister and I from the terrible, colour-draining sounds and the equally terrible silences. For a few minutes, that story held my attention to such a degree that I cared a little less about the then immediate threat to my own life, and those of my family. I was reliving the earliest prenatal threat to my as yet unformed life. There before me were my parents now irreversibly trapped in the tiny, damp bathroom, with their own children hiding away from the threat of bullets and bombs, and there – in the retelling of that story – was the possibility, now discarded, that my very real mother and father could have never been. The impending threat of death-by-shrapnel seemed now to be less impending.

&n
bsp; But to have once been a living being, to have once had a mother and father, and at once lost them; is that not better than to forever be a story about a letter which so disheartened my mother and so intimidated my father that they never became mine, and I never came to be? My mother shuddered when she recalled the contents of that letter and my father’s eyes fixed more intensely on the ceiling, or perhaps past the ceiling itself. What strength, internal or external, had compelled my mother to defy the force of my grandfather’s personality, the brutality of his words? It was not until sometime after those nights spent in the bathroom that my mother touched upon the subject again, in another private Arak-infused, smoke-basked conversation which lasted well past midnight but not a minute more after that.

  ANDALUSIA AND THE MOORS

  Alana was not Druze. I asked her. Alana was Canadian. She said she was Canadian and believed it. Her parents were both Lebanese but she had lived with them in Montreal for three or four years. She moved with her mother to Verdun Street. Her father would visit them a few times a year.

  When I asked her if she was Muslim or Christian, she said again that she was Canadian. Then I asked her what her nationality was. She stared right through me and I never mentioned her nationality or her religion again.

  Basil and I signed up to work as summer camp monitors. He said he knew someone on the inside who could get us the job and all we really had to do was make sure that a few kids don’t drown at the beach and then get them home safe to their parents at the end of the day. Alana had had the same idea.

  ‘I used to babysit my cousins all the time, in Montreal,’ she said.

  Alana looked bronze by the time she started working for the Octopus Summer Camp. Except for the bits around her eyes, still relatively white because of her aviator Ray-Bans which she would gently remove only to make a point and then return when the point was duly made.

  Waist deep in sea water and with one of Don Amin’s trademark whistles hanging around my neck, I watched as Alana lifted a three-year-old onto her back and ordered the rest of the children to follow her into the sea. She needn’t have said a word, that day they would have followed her to the moon, or to Gibraltar at least.

  ‘Oh my warriors, whither would you flee? Behind you is the sea, before you, the enemy.’

  Tariq Bin Ziyad’s immortal words did not feel out of place coming from her lips which were thick and full and hid her otherwise protruding canines well. Alana could have reconquered Andalusia for the Moors with an army of children and a three-year-old on her back. I was sure of it.

  At Janna Beach Resort, she placed both her hands on my shoulders and tried to drown me. As I was standing in the sea and we were still in the shallow end, this did not work. Then she ordered the children to drown me, and they ran towards me, a wave of onrushing five-year-olds kicking through sand and shallow waters to try and drown me.

  ‘Put far from you the disgrace from which you flee in dreams, and attack this monarch who has left his strongly fortified city to meet you.’

  This did not work either.

  Also, as she was making her way through to help them out, one of the five-year-olds managed to unhook her bikini top. She was able to hold onto it and prevent the waves from carrying it away, but not before I and a number of five-year-olds got to admire her white breasts.

  ‘Do not believe that I desire to incite you to face dangers which I shall refuse to share with you.’

  She told them off and I laughed. Then she laughed and I told them off.

  Alana explained that Basil had made a bet with her, worth fifty thousand Lebanese liras, that she could not drown me. She said she would give me half of them if I pretended to drown. I said I did not want half of them. She said she would give me all of them. And I said I did not want all of them. Then she said she would give me another peek at her breasts because she saw how much I enjoyed the first one. She said she needed to get them tanned anyway and that she did not mind a Muslim Lebanese boy perving over them while she did. I said I was not Muslim. She said she did not care.

  We swam as far away from the shore as we could. I looked back and the children were little dots in the distance and Basil was a slightly bigger dot – in an unbuttoned white shirt which he had refused to take off all day – and it was winking. Alana unhooked her bikini top, closed her eyes and floated on her back, allowing the sun to kiss her breasts. And I stared at her breasts, unashamedly. I stared at them for so long that I could see them start to turn a different shade of bronze. I mentioned this to her.

  ‘You would know,’ she said, ‘you’ve been staring at them for twenty minutes.’

  Alana said that I should be an astronaut if that is what I wanted to be. I said I was not so sure anymore. I said that I wanted to be but that if I was not, it would be alright too. She said she had always wanted to be Canadian and now she was.

  ‘Never give up on your dream,’ she said, gently removing her aviators even as she lay floating on her back in the murky water.

  The oil from the Israeli warships, coupled with the waste from nearby factories and sewage plants, had severely damaged aquatic life along Lebanese shores. We had been instructed not to allow the children to swim for more than one hour a day in the sea. Alana and I ignored this. The sea was littered with empty bags of Fantasia chips and glass Pepsi bottles, and we reasoned that a bit of oil could not have done too much more harm.

  ‘What about you?’ I asked.

  She wore a silver necklace around her neck. There was no Hilal or cross attached to it.

  ‘I don’t want to be an astronaut,’ she said, eyes closed, ‘it must be the loneliest feeling in the world. Why would you do that to yourself?’

  ‘Perspective,’ I said.

  I plunged my head underwater then slowly emerged so that my nose rose barely above the warm water.

  ‘Whose?’

  I let the salty water be sucked into my gaping mouth, then I spat it out. My eyes were now level with her breasts and I could see the children walking in behind them and coming out the other side. There was a miniature version of myself in space gear landing on her chest, floating past the little spot on her left breast, around the first nipple, into the cavernous valley in between, all the while gaining momentum, then bursting furiously uphill to plant the American flag on her right nipple. It was always the Stars and Stripes that were synonymous with achievement, with overcoming adversity, with a sense of accomplishment, with the act of marking success by planting a flag on a mountain top, or a moon or a nipple.

  ‘I suppose being the first woman on the moon doesn’t sound too bad,’ she continued.

  ‘The first Arab woman.’

  ‘The first woman, habibi. Even the Americans couldn’t get one of us up there.’

  She splashed the oily water into my eyes.

  ‘I know.’

  ‘And besides, I’m Canadian.’

  ‘I know.’

  There was a long pause for which the waves were grateful.

  ‘You won’t be able to achieve your dreams if you spend your whole life in Beirut,’ she said.

  ‘I know.’

  Behind me was Cyprus, and behind Cyprus was Sicily and behind that was Valencia, and in between all of them and Beirut was the salty water of the Mediterranean, and me. And Alana.

  ‘Not much sun in Montreal?’ I asked.

  Alana told me about one of the little girls she was looking after who pitied her because she had lived in the West.

  ‘It’s so sad,’ the little girl had proclaimed.

  ‘Why?’ I asked Alana.

  ‘Because the sun always sets in the west,’ said Alana, ‘she thinks I could only see sunsets in Montreal.’

  The sun hovered above the horizon.

  ‘It is a city for the summer and not much else,’ she said, opening her eyes and craning her neck to look at me, ‘but it is alright in the summer, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes. It is,’ I said, nodding my head and squinting to protect my eyes from the sun.

 
; To the casual human observer, I was giving a drowning girl mouth to mouth resuscitation. I was breathing air into her lungs. I was saving a life. I was fighting, railing against death and the mild, gentle waves of the Mediterranean. To Alana, I was giving her a kiss on the lips, at first a soft peck then a deeper more inquisitive exploration of the inner workings of her moist mouth. To the oil-sodden fish, I was in the way.

  ‘When do you think you’ll be able to grow a full beard?’ she asked, removing her hand from the side of my face.

  I shrugged my shoulders. I looked at Alana, half expecting her to morph into one of the mermaids. She did not.

  I helped her put her purple bikini top back on then we swam back to the shallow bit. She jumped on top of me and, at first, I let her weight drag me down. I lowered my body so that my shoulders were level with the water.

  Alana gave me a gentle push in order to remind me of our agreement but I did not budge. Then she gave me another gentle push to remind me of the fact that she had upheld her end of the bargain. Then she put her knee through the back of my head and I fell face forward into the salty water. The children cheered and Alana raised her right arm in the air. They called her name and she blew them kisses and they skipped up and down the sand, celebrating the conquest.

  I stayed in the water for a few minutes afterwards. I looked at the sun, without blinking, until I had tears in my eyes. In the distance, I saw a whale. It was blueish white and not very big. I only saw it for a second. I might have only seen the tail. I plunged my head into the water again, then walked back to shore. Basil, still in his dirty white shirt with the sleeves rolled up to the elbows, extended the palm of his hand and I reached for my wallet, which I had tucked neatly under my blue towel, and gave him two twenty thousand Lebanese lira notes and told him I would cover the rest later.