I was standing on Westminster Bridge watching the fireworks when he died. It was a cold November evening in London, more than a decade later. I still could not grow a beard. I had one arm around a German girl called Lisa, whom I had met two years previous, when I received the call from my mother.
I would tease Lisa about Hitler and she would tease me about bin Laden. I said bin Laden was not Lebanese, he was Saudi Arabian, and she said Hitler was not German, he was Austrian.
At first the doctors thought it was just an infection. When he coughed, they gave him an antibiotic and my sister patted him on the back and my mother made him tea and I spoke to him on the phone and wished him well. I asked him if I should come to Beirut for a visit, and he said he would never forgive me if I did. It was not an infection. It was lung cancer in the end.
I could hear my sister suppressing sobs in the background over the phone.
‘What are we going to do with all those books?’ asked my mother, her coarse voice cracking.
Over the years, her voice had come to resemble that of Teta Mary. She said it was as if the books had lost their purpose. The ink faded and the paper hardened and the covers discarded their colour and assumed more sombre attire instead.
In his final few days, he was put into an induced coma. The doctors said it was the humane thing to do. My mother placed the phone against his ear. Talk to him, she told me. I stayed silent throughout until I heard my mother’s voice again.
‘Adam,’ she whispered, ‘what did you say?’
She said he was weeping in his sleep. It sounded like a line out of the very many obituaries he had written over the years.
‘Weeping?’
‘Tears hanging off the edge of his moustache,’ she said, ‘I can’t explain it.’
She explained that his head was propped up with pillows because the doctors were afraid that he might choke on his own fluids.
I squinted to shield my eyes from the cold and buried my nose behind my thick, hoary scarf. Lisa had both arms wrapped around my waist and her sharp chin resting on my chest. Her long brown hair smelled of coconut oil. She bit her chapped lips, and though she did not speak, vapour escaped her mouth. It was her idea to watch the fireworks from Westminster Bridge. I had been pacing the flat in Battersea, which was not a sea at all, waiting for the news from Beirut when she announced that I needed a change of scenery.
‘I’ll call you back,’ I said.
I tucked the phone into my coat pocket.
Just below the pupil in her right eye, Lisa had a little black spot which almost resembled another eye. It stared at me even when she was not. It held my gaze at any given moment and for as long as necessary
‘I’m sorry, leibling,’ said Lisa, and she kissed my neck and she pulled tightly at my waistcoat.
Her nasal voice was forever on the verge of erupting into sincere but inappropriate laughter.
The fireworks were launched into the air, above the River Thames, but soon hid behind the fog and the clouds. We watched the clouds and heard the explosions and felt the rain as it fell on our unfettered heads.
THE GOAT
Abou Abbas’s voice seemed to come from across the sea at first. I heard it, like I had heard the first few gunshots days earlier, in a state of semi-consciousness within which only the sounds were real but not the images. Abou Abbas had carried my unconscious father over his shoulder and into the back seat of his car. He drove us to the hospital in his rusty old Honda Civic hatchback which he had painted himself and you could tell because he had not done a very good job of it. The original colour was blue but it had since been painted silver, all over including the side-view mirrors and the tail lights. The faint blue exposed itself through the murky greyish-silver. A large arabesque sticker spread across the top of the windshield read: ‘There is no god but God.’
The Honda only had two doors. Abou Abbas shoved my silent father into the car while I adjusted the front seats and held the door open. I sat in the front next to Abou Abbas so that we could spread my father’s body across the back seat.
‘I will step on the pedal and take my foot off for nothing,’ warned Abou Abbas, adjusting the steering wheel, ‘do you understand?’
I nodded. On the other side of the street, a cat lay in a puddle of its own blood. He placed his hand on the back of my neck.
‘One hundred and eighty kilometres per hour. Checkpoint or no checkpoint,’ he said, handing me a pistol which he had tucked under his belt, ‘barrier or no barrier. I drive, and if anyone tries to stop us, you shoot. Do you understand?’
I nodded. I placed the pistol on the dashboard. There was pubic hair stuck to the barrel of the gun. I grasped it tight with both hands. It was warm and smelled of sweat.
‘Keep your head down. Our lives are not cheap, son. Do you understand?’
Abou Abbas talked nearly the whole way through, he did not stop to breathe or bite his lip and he did not puncture his speech with laughter or a sigh or two.
‘This is why the country has gone to the dogs, you see,’ he said, taking one hand off the wheel to roll down the window. ‘People like this. They make the country what it is – duck, son, duck. Our lives are not cheap – and people like you, they leave. And why wouldn’t you? If the Queen of England had need for a grocer like me, I’d be in London selling Ras El Abed and toilet paper to Sean Connery and Paul McCartney. You know, I once had tickets to go see McCartney in Dubai. This was after his Beatles days. After John died. What was the name of the fourth one? I could never remember. It was when I was still working as a cab driver. I wasn’t always a grocer. Sometimes, I think to myself, I think, Abou Abbas, you should have left when you were younger. You should have sought asylum. And why not? I could have said, I’ve pissed off Hezbollah or the Syrians, by kissing some Israeli ass. Who would care? I would know it wasn’t true. I could live with that. With being a traitor.
Or I could say I pissed off the Israelis because I helped the Syrians, but I doubt they would take too kindly to that at the British embassy. Imagine that. Can you imagine that? Young Abou Abbas, at the British embassy. Asking the British to hide him from the Israeli’s? Or the Americans? They would call your Uncle Sharon on the phone and say, “We’ve got something that belongs to you, you want to send someone to pick him up?” Imagine that. And the Israelis would say: “Abou Abbas, that bastard, he cost us Beirut, we could have had Beirut if it weren’t for Abou Abbas”, because they would not want to sound incompetent in front of the Americans or the British.
And your Uncle Abou Abbas, he would spend fifteen, twenty years in prison until some reporter from somewhere finds out about my story, or Angelina Jolie might find out about me and my conditions. She would say something about this being a violation of human rights, and I would be out and I’d come back here to open a grocery shop right here. Right where it is, right now, except I’d be a different man. A different man to the man I am today.
And maybe I wouldn’t be Abou Abbas, because I wouldn’t have had the time to marry Em Abbas, and father Abbas. But that is alright, because I would be a hero. Wouldn’t I? A hero for trying to run away. I find the world often works like that. It confuses you about things you thought were clear and pure and obvious. Don’t you? I do, anyway. I do.’
‘I do,’ I said, as Abou Abbas drove into a ditch in the road, then out of it and into another one. He went over speed bumps as if their entire purpose was to give the Honda some elevation. My father appeared undisturbed by the turbulence. The grocer glanced at his rear-view mirror.
‘I’ll tell you, for instance,’ continued Abou Abbas, as the Honda shook violently and he lit a Cedars with one hand on the steering wheel, ‘there was this man who lived on my street when I was growing up. He was a handsome man, old enough to be married and old enough to be divorced, but sane enough to have done neither. Which was odd enough because in general, he was nuts. Crazy, I tell you. Whenever he asked for money, the adults would ignore him, you know, tell him go away. I didn’t know why.
My parents
, God rest their souls, were generous people, to everyone except this man. Then my friends and I were playing hide and seek once on the street, we must’ve been about ten, and we saw him. It turns out, he had a habit of putting the money he had collected down the sewer hole every day at five in the afternoon. That was why the adults ignored him. He thought he was saving them. He thought he had an entire life’s worth of savings down the sewer hole. And in fairness, he probably did. My friends and I kept giving him krouch just to watch him drop them down the same sewer hole, every day at five. And all this is fine and well, you know, but that is not the point of the story. The point is, pretty soon, people started speculating. They must’ve thought: no one is that crazy, no one is that nuts. It must be an act. And you know what? They said he was Mossad, a traitor. Because if I were Mossad, that is what I’d want to be doing all day, you know. Collecting money from kids and then dropping it down the sewer hole. But I knew he wasn’t Mossad. I knew it. That smile. That was clear and pure and obvious. Then one day he just did not show up at five in the afternoon. For the next few days, I kept dropping those krouch into the same sewer hole for him. But it wasn’t the same, you know. He was gone, in the past. I didn’t believe in the sewer hole, like he did. Maybe, he was a Mossad traitor, maybe I am, maybe you are. Are you?’
‘No,’ I said.
‘The past is like a rear-view mirror,’ he said, his eyes flickering in the direction of the erstwhile metaphor-laden object, ‘if you fix your eyes on it too often, you’ll crash.’
The Honda backfired. I fired my pistol in the air, twice. The bullets pierced the roof of the car.
‘What the fuck are you doing with that, son?’
Abou Abbas had kept his foot against the pedal even as he turned his head towards me.
‘I thought we were under attack,’ I shouted back.
‘Give it here,’ he said, extending the palm of his dry hand.
I fired two more shots through the roof of the Honda.
‘Keep your head down, son. Our lives are not cheap,’ said Abou Abbas, taking a sharp breath for the first time and retracting his hand. ‘Would you ever consider it, though?’
‘Consider what?’
‘Joining the Mossad.’
We could hear gunshots echoing throughout the deserted street. They were louder than the roar of Abou Abbas’s Honda Civic but distant. He leaned forward and dug his foot in and placed both hands on the steering wheel. There was more purpose in his driving, a more focused intent, though still not urgent. It had stopped raining and militiamen were done with their smoke break.
‘No,’ I said.
‘That certainty,’ he said, ‘that is the certainty of youth. It will desert you. And then what will you do?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said.
‘Exactly.’
I placed my head between the front seats in order to get a better look at my father. The fact that he was still breathing was of little comfort to me. The car shot forwards and I realised that I had been inadvertently pointing my gun at Abou Abbas. He had not uttered a word for fear that I might pull the trigger in response. I sat back and resumed pointing the gun at the roof of the car. Abou Abbas remained silent for the remainder of the drive to the hospital.
As my father was being carried off into the emergency room, Abou Abbas put his hand on my neck and pulled me closer to him.
‘It wasn’t a coincidence,’ he whispered. ‘That boy Adel was outside my shop waiting for your father. He knew your father would come at some point and he waited there for several days. Someone from the SSNP wanted to teach him a lesson.’
I tried to tell my father. But Jesus Mohammad Christ said never to mention it again.
Abou Abbas later complained that he was finding it very hard to wash the blood off the back seat and that the bullet holes in the roof were leaking water into it. He hinted at this every time my father passed by his shop until finally my father relented and bought it from him. Abou Abbas claimed that he had only wanted my father to pay for it to be properly cleaned and patched up, but my father insisted that Abou Abbas was looking to get rid of his Honda and that my father’s blood, and my bullet holes, were the perfect excuse. My sister dubbed it ‘the Muslim car’.
Abou Abbas drove me back home. I shook his hand. He gave me a kiss on the cheek and a pat on the shoulder and followed me up the stairs. There had been no electricity for the entire day. And the phone lines were dead. I walked into the apartment. My mother stood behind the door, right beside the two towering blocks of literature, and my sister was crouched on the floor leaning against the wall. My mother wrapped her arms around me and kissed my chest and neck and cheeks. I made my way towards the kitchen.
‘Where’s your father?’ she asked, as Abou Abbas panted his way towards the door.
I laid out the flatbread on the kitchen table and I began slicing the halloumi. I placed the pistol by the halloumi.
‘Adam. Where’s your father?’ she said, her voice high-pitched and her breath short.
She clutched the back of my shirt and pulled at it with a firm grip. I lost my balance momentarily then steadied my knife hand.
‘He is fine, Mrs. Najjar,’ said Abou Abbas, laying a still blood-stained hand on her shoulder. ‘He is a strong man, your husband.’
I sliced my finger. She shoved me aside and took the knife from my hand and continued slicing the halloumi.
‘I knew it. Did I know it? I knew it,’ she told the cheese, slicing away at it with force, ‘I said we should leave, years ago.’
Then she made me a sandwich and I sat down on the remaining foldable kitchen chair. I wiped the blood on my pants. My mother handed me a towel. I wiped my pants then my hands then my face with the towel. I wrapped the damp towel around my thumb. She watched me eat the halloumi sandwich, all the while tapping her foot. And Abou Abbas watched me eat it too, as he filled my mother in on the vague details. My sister hid behind Abu Abbas which was not hard. She stared at my now blood-smeared face and he turned his attention to the pistol.
‘It’s not my place,’ he kept saying, in between the fragments of his newfangled story, ‘it’s not my place.’
It was in that same rusted old Honda civic, a couple of years after my father had been kneecapped by the militiamen, that Basil announced he would soon make his way to Syria to join the ‘revolution’. My mother had placed a navy-blue tablecloth with a sprinkle of smiling suns on the back seat to cover the blood stains. My father had not bothered with patching up the bullet holes. Damp books and soggy newspapers soon found their way onto the back seat. I had my foot on the brakes and was willing the red light to turn green. Traffic lights had always been more of a suggestion in Beirut. I could hear the honking behind us.
‘Some of us have things to do,’ shouted the cab driver in the nineteen-seventy-something Mercedes model.
His cigarette hand dangled outside the window and was reflected in the side-view mirror.
To our right was the large, green campus of the American University of Beirut and to our left was the Mediterranean. The campus was one of the few green spots left in Beirut. All four windows were rolled down and Basil’s shirt had turned from beige to charcoal grey. The air conditioning in the Honda had long since ceased to work.
‘You and whose army?’ I asked, but I already knew the answer.
‘The SSNP,’ he said.
‘You can’t be serious,’ I said, the car spluttered.
‘Put your foot through that gas pedal,’ shouted the cab driver, now sticking his head out the window, ‘may you bury your mother.’
This last wish expressed by the moustached cab driver was not a curse, it was a pleasantry. It implied that he hoped I would live long enough to bury my own mother; and that he trusted I would step on the gas pedal long before that eventuality.
‘I have been for a while now,’ said Basil, falling silent for a moment, ‘this is our chance to stop talking about a unified Syria and do something about it.’
‘Is that
what he told you?’
Basil let out a sigh. He gazed out the window at the Mediterranean. We could smell the dead fish and some living ones too.
As we drove north alongside the sea, the sparkle of lights from the houses in the mountains blended in with the stars, forming clusters which seemed to float just above Beirut and fade into the light at sunrise.
My father would point those mountains out as my sister and I sat in the back seat of the Oldsmobile complaining about the density of the books and the smell of the damp, rotten newspapers. He started off with the white tops of Mount Sanine and Tanourine, which had both been trademarked for brands of bottled water. Then he would squint, reach out with his right hand and point out Rim and Sohat and Nestle and Perrier, which were brands of bottled water too but not mountains.
A child, no doubt a refugee, leapt onto the hood of the Honda and pressed the side of his sun-kissed but water-spurned face against the windshield. I took my foot off the brakes, the car edged forward, the child slid off the side.
‘Buy me a manouche,’ he demanded, banging his fist against the window
I sped past the red light.
‘Mr Malik did not have anything to do with that incident involving your father,’ said Basil, without turning.
It was the first time the subject had been broached. Neither he nor Mr Malik had come to visit my father at the hospital nor had they brought up the ‘revolutionary book’ again. Ms Iman showed up with a bouquet of flowers on behalf of the school. My sister pulled at the white petals, and proclaimed that they were real not fake despite the lack of fragrance. Abu Abbas passed by the hospital every other day for a week. Mohammad and his father dropped by with a box of chocolates. Not Cadbury. Wael’s mother, who accompanied him to the hospital, made him write a ‘get well soon’ card which he delivered by hand to my father, who whistled and tapped Wael on the back of the head lightly. The Captain made an appearance too and he promised my father his coldest Almaza. He gave me a nod and a transient, wry grin.
Between Beirut and the Moon Page 21
