Between Beirut and the Moon

by A. Naji Bakhti

  ‘Excuse me?’ asked Madame Hafez.

  ‘Who uproots a tree that a girl planted in the ground and throws it in the bin?’ asked my sister.

  There are rare instances when a wronged child speaks and you see the rip in space and time, the affronted adult emerge and the words flow from the coarser lips. If you should happen to miss the rip in space and time, observe the adults in the room. They will squirm. Their noses will shrink, their eyes double in size, their cheeks inflate, their wrinkles fade away and their foreheads enlarge to occupy most of their faces pushing the rest of their features down towards the chin which often takes on a less angular form shedding any residual facial hair and developing a crisp gleam. And once the rip in space and time occurs, reality very briefly manifests itself in unstable form.

  ‘I did no such thing,’ said Madame Hafez, squirming.

  ‘It wasn’t me,’ said a fresh-faced Lusine.

  The latter had a lisp.

  ‘It was a tree given to her by the school on Independence Day, a few years ago,’ said my mother, ‘I don’t expect you would remember this.’

  ‘You’re lying,’ shouted a little brunette girl who resembled my mother, her teeth a pearly white not yet stained with nicotine.

  ‘What kind of tree was it?’ asked Madam Hafez.

  ‘What tree?’ asked young Lusine.

  ‘A cedar tree and you killed it,’ said my sister.

  ‘That’s enough,’ said my father who had his arm around my sister.

  ‘I don’t want to play anymore,’ said my young father, his face no longer jowly, his eyes bright and unsaddled with bags, his moustache gone.

  ‘Whoever planted that tree there killed it. I merely cleaned up the mess that was left behind,’ said Madame Hafez.

  ‘It was him. I’m telling you. It was him,’ said Lusine.

  My sister looked up at my father, who placed both his hands on her shoulders.

  ‘You don’t know that it would have died,’ he said, now staring at Madame Hafez.

  ‘Cedar trees do not belong by the coast. They belong in the mountains,’ said Madame Hafez staring back. ‘Have you ever seen a cedar tree in Beirut?’

  ‘It would have been the first one,’ said my father.

  ‘It would have been the first one,’ said my young father, fists clenched, eyebrows furled, teeth grating.

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous, Mr Najjar. You’re a grown man. It would have died and you know it.’

  ‘Surely, you could have let her find this out for herself,’ said my father.

  ‘That’s enough,’ said my mother.

  ‘It is not my job to teach your children life lessons,’ replied Madame Hafez as the elevator arrived at the ground floor.

  It is then that my sister’s curls began to unfurl. It happened almost imperceptibly at first, then a couple of them would audibly snap into a faultless, listless strand of hair and so dangle from her scalp down to her shoulders, as if exhausted by the sheer outrage. In the following years my sister would begin to use a hair straightener, but long before the BaByliss there was Madame Hafez and her crimes against cedar trees, there was sitting silently in the back seat of the Oldsmobile, there was clinging onto the edge of the bed at my grandparents’ place, there was being refused the option to fast by my mother and the opportunity to publish an article by my father, there was getting up to change the channel at our every whim, there was having to navigate the untold horrors of my father’s book room, there was being called Fara which it would transpire, a few decades later, she did not in fact like.

  My father reached for the Vintage Otis wooden scissor gate and slammed it open. Madame Hafez stood aside and my father stomped his way out, adjusting his collar as he did so.

  ‘Everything alright, Basha?’ asked Saeed, the porter, who was standing by the entrance to the building in his flip-flops.

  ‘Do you have cedar trees in Egypt, Saeed?’ asked my father.

  My father’s question caught everyone but the porter off guard. The latter had, evidently, never given up hope that my father would one day directly address him again. His answer was succinct and then it was adjusted in order to please my father.

  ‘We do not, Basha. I think it is too hot in Egypt for cedars.’

  ‘But do you think that if you really wanted to, you could grow one?’

  ‘I hear there is snow in Dubai now. You can go and ski there, if you really wanted to. So I don’t see why not.’

  My father turned on his heel and smiled in the direction of Madame Hafez who was still making her way out of the elevator, while my mother held the door for her. He opened his arms as if he had just conjured a cedar tree out of the ether, as if there was a judge sitting where an old lady was climbing out of an elevator, as if there was a jury lined up on the stairway behind him, as if out there, past the green gate which led into the building, there were cameramen and camerawomen and reporters jostling to get a glimpse of the man who had proven to the world that cedar trees, that Cedrus libani, could, if one really wanted them to, be grown in Beirut.

  ‘But I would not go to Dubai to ski,’ added Saeed, ‘I would not go to Dubai at all.’

  Wars and Cities of the Middle East was never published. And Through the Middle East was never published. And From Armenia to Lebanon was never published. And, perhaps above all, Sykes-Picot and I was never published.

  The day Mohammad came in to school after his father had disappeared was a memorable one, in that the teachers mostly did not know how to behave. It happened a day after that rip in space and time within the walls of the elevator. I wondered whether his disappearance was an unintended by-product of that tear in the very fabric of the universe, but Mohammad explained that his father had not disappeared at all.

  ‘He was kidnapped,’ said Mohammad.

  ‘From his bed?’ asked Basil.

  ‘It was a targeted operation.’

  Ms Mayssa offered her condolences, to which Mohammad replied that he thought his father was still alive. Ms Mayssa then took back her condolences.

  ‘The Don was right about this one,’ said Mohammad, as she left the class.

  Mr Abu Alam pretended that the whole kidnapping had not taken place, and Mohammad burst into tears in the middle of the former’s explanation of relativity. It was not even on the syllabus for that term but I suspect he believed that Einstein’s theory of relativity would prove enough of a distraction for the day.

  Mr Malik singled Mohammad out and asked him to recite a poem written by Al Mutanabbi, an egomaniacal, tenth-century Arab poet who had played at being a prophet. He later recanted his claim but the name ‘Mutanabbi’, which means ‘the self-proclaimed prophet’, stuck. Under the circumstances, Mohammad did what can only be described as an admirable job. He walked up to the front of the class and stood by Mr Malik’s desk. He looked at Mr Malik who nodded then mouthed the words ‘go on’ without uttering another word.

  At first it was incoherent blubbering, and Basil swore he heard him stumble over the words ‘I want my father’. Then Mohammad straightened his back and treated us to his own summation of Al Mutanabbi’s greatest hits. The structure made little sense and whole poems were reduced to one or two verses, he even modified certain words and arguably added substance.

  ‘I am he whose literature is seen by the blind. And whose words are heard by the deaf.

  ‘The steed, the night and the desert know me. As do the sword, the spear, the paper and the pen – and the eraser.’

  The class fell quiet again and you could hear the overhead fan humming its approval.

  ‘Man does not obtain all that he wishes. The winds take the ships where they do not desire to go.

  ‘If you see the lion’s teeth displayed, do not think that the lion is smiling – or frowning either.’

  Nadine and Wael led a round of applause, Basil and I joined in half-heartedly and so did the rest of the class. Mr Malik shook his head and waved Mohammad back to his seat.

  According to Mohammad, a helico
pter had descended onto the roof of their building in the middle of the night. A group of armed men had burst through the door and led his father out of there.

  ‘They spoke Hebrew,’ he said, during break, as he spread himself along the green wooden bench under the acorn tree.

  There had not been a president for so long that the school simply opted to paint over where the portrait once stood.

  ‘So not the SSNP then?’ asked Basil.

  ‘This is not funny,’ said Mohammad, looking up at us with his hand now resting on his forehead.

  Wael smacked Basil across the back of the head.

  ‘Are all Syrian Nationalists idiots,’ asked Wael, ‘or is it just you?’

  The incident had been all over the news featuring Mohammad’s mother wailing and Mohammad standing in the background looking perplexed, almost like he was about to recite one of Mr Malik’s poeMs His father shared the same name as the leader of Hezbollah at the time. This had been enough to puzzle the Israelis and rush the Mossad into an operation which ended with them in possession of a fairly jovial and clean shaven man. The nation had been caught between a mood of comic disbelief and one of concern for the fate of the unfortunate namesake.

  ‘What’s in a name?’ the LBC news anchor exclaimed, cocking an eyebrow. ‘A lot, apparently.’

  I wondered what Mr Aston would have made of that appropriation.

  The only self-evident piece of information available was that someone from the Israeli side had committed a mishap. This made the Israelis the butt of a joke for a couple of weeks.

  ‘An Israeli walked into an electronics store to buy a coloured TV,’ said Basil, pausing to look over his shoulder, ‘When the owner asked him which coloured TV he would like. He said, “An orange one”.’

  Even Mohammad laughed timidly at that.

  ‘Do you think they’ll return him?’ I asked.

  ‘Return him?’ asked Mohammad in a raised pitch. ‘Like he was a shoe that did not fit.’

  Basil leaned in and muttered his assessment of the situation in my ear; it was to do with Mohammad being a bit too dramatic, even for a boy whose father had just been kidnapped by the Mossad.

  It did not matter whether I agreed, I was glad to have a private moment with Basil. He and I had found our time together constrained now that he was spending more of it after classes with younger boys who would lurk outside school for him to emerge and greet him with a cigarette or two. These new recruits of the SSNP – his own or Mr Malik’s, I could not tell – usually nodded in my general direction. Somewhere within the nod there was also a nudge, or on those less subtle days, a shoulder barge. I was never personally introduced to any of them – though I did recognise a regular boy with a pudgy face and dimples who was always the first to spot me – and Basil, sensing that they were not my crowd, would pat me on the back as we approached the school gate and promise to catch up later.

  Ms Iman, who seemed to know where on school grounds to find us, walked straight in between Basil and myself and sat on the green bench by Mohammad’s head. He hesitated at first, his body stiffened and his hand gripped the edge of the bench. Basil and I both stood over Ms Iman, hands in our pockets, with Wael behind us.

  Ms Iman placed her hand on Mohammad’s forehead. She shaped her lips to say something but did not. Emboldened by this, Mohammad laid his head against her lap and turned his neck so that he was now facing her Bordeaux shirt. And he sobbed. He sobbed like a man, not a boy. At one point his knee slammed hard against the back of the bench but he did not acknowledge this at all. Basil and I tried to expand our adolescent bodies as much as we possibly could in order to conceal Mohammad from the rest of the school. But we could not.

  We looked to Wael for guidance on this matter, but his body contracted instead as if to shield an infant from the weight of the world. Every passer-by would have seen Mohammad that day, his head buried in Ms Iman’s lap, his chest heaving, his shoulders shivering, his torso shaking, his voice cracking.

  Ms Iman pursed her lips and for some time said nothing. She looked at the three of us and the edge of her mouth dipped.

  ‘Maybe he should have stayed at home,’ said Wael, planting his elbows on mine and Basil’s shoulders.

  Wael was so tall that he sometimes had to duck when Mr Abu Alam aimed his famous Highlanders at us in class. The trajectory of the physics teacher’s flying Highlanders was spot on when it came to narrowly, but purposefully, missing most of us. Wael, however, quickly found that he was an exception, a statistical anomaly.

  ‘It happens,’ said Ms Iman, stroking Mohammad’s hair.

  She might have meant the sobbing or the kidnapping. I was back in the bathroom hiding from the bombs.

  This encouraged Mohammad who took his sobbing to a more pronounced level.

  ‘Now he’s definitely milking it,’ said Basil, nudging me in the ribs and squeezing the udders of an invisible cow.

  Wael smacked the both of us across the back of the head before I could protest.

  For the first week, no one heard anything about Mr Nasrallah. Ms Mayssa refrained from reoffering her condolences and classes carried on as usual. During break, Basil and I speculated that the whole scenario was an elaborate ploy devised by Mohammad’s father as a means of escape. We did this away from Wael and Mohammad because we did not want to appear callous.

  ‘He’ll have called the Israelis up and begged them to kidnap him,’ said Basil, but he did not laugh.

  Then on a Wednesday, in the second week, Mohammad did not come to school. We later learned that another helicopter had landed on the roof of their building and dropped off a disorientated Mr Nasrallah. He was escorted, blindfolded, down the stairs and left in the hallway. He staggered into the front door and Mohammad, who had slept in the living room by the door, with his mother, rushed to open it.

  The jovial man was no longer so clean shaven.

  ‘He did not know where he was at first,’ said Mohammad, in the morning just outside class. ‘He shouted something about fucking the mother of the next man who lays a finger on him.’

  The man’s lip was swollen.

  ‘Was he badly bruised?’ asked Wael, placing his hands on his waist.

  ‘Not at all,’ said Mohammad, ‘once he realised it was me who was hugging him. He calmed down.’

  Mohammad chewed his gum thoroughly then he tossed it in the air and swung his foot at it but missed. He winced.

  ‘He must be Mossad,’ whispered Basil in my ear. ‘How else do you explain him waltzing back into the country like nothing happened?’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ I said.

  Mr Nasrallah was in his mid-sixties but he stayed up that night telling them how tiresome this whole trip had been and repeating that there truly is no place like home. It was as if he had been to London on a business trip. He refused to do any interviews and when one TV reporter would not leave, he told her that he could arrange for her to be picked up by the Israelis from her place if she really insisted on an interview.

  ‘He’s gone,’ said Basil, grabbing my arm and squeezing it tightly for a moment.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The pimp. I couldn’t believe it at first. I thought for sure he’d come back. I told my mother about the picture. They had a big row. He’s gone.’

  ‘Your father?’ I asked, disingenuously. ‘When?’

  A few weeks prior, I had been helping my mother carry the groceries up the staircase after a power outage, when she ran into an acquaintance of hers who was there visiting Madame Hafez. The acquaintance mentioned Mr Abou Mekhi – and wasn’t his son a classmate of your son? That poor fatherless boy. My mother turned towards me. Sweat dripped down the sides of her face and her fingers strained to prevent her palms from opening to unleash bags of onions and bell peppers rolling back down the stairs. She closed her eyes and opened them gently then pushed on, lugging the groceries up the next flight. And I followed.

  ‘Three weeks ago,’ said Basil.

  He patted his pockets for
a cigarette or a lighter. When he could not find what he was looking for, he made his way steadily towards the school gates without another word.

  Basil and my father sat opposite one another at the dinner table, between them were stacks of books including one titled God, Arab Nationalism and the Leader. I sat on the comfortable couch in the living room. This was the only time they spoke at length. Up to that point, my father would acknowledge Basil by giving him a nod and asking how his father was doing and never stopping to hear the answer. I could see them clearly but they would have had to crane their necks to look at me. A wall of books towered over Basil. It was a business meeting and I was there only to moderate.

  Basil had come up to me after Ms Shahab’s maths class. The board was devoid of shapes. There were only numbers and radical signs and ‘unknowns’ symbolized by an X or Y.

  ‘Remind me to get Wael to go over all of this again later,’ said Basil. ‘Numbers make about as much sense as politics in the Middle East.’

  He had become good at interweaving subjects which had seemingly little in common with one another. I suspected that this was Mr Malik’s influence but I did not make this known.

  Basil went on to explain that Mr Malik had written a book about the political state of the region and that our mutual Arabic teacher’s wish was for my father to publish it.

  ‘A revolutionary book,’ Basil described it. He said he would be happy to tell me a lot more about it if I had time.

  ‘Don’t you have to meet up with the SSNP boys?’

  ‘Not today,’ he said. He shook his head and offered a smile which was not his.

  It has occurred to me since that Basil was the first literary agent I had ever met, though I was not familiar with the term at the time. I never read the book. I held the manuscript in my hands that day and it seemed heavy enough to start a revolution. When I looked at my father’s face, I saw that it would not.

  ‘It is bland,’ my father said, leaning closer to Basil. ‘It is repetitive Pan-Syrian-light bullshit repackaged to fit the social nationalist agenda of today.’