Between Beirut and the Moon

by A. Naji Bakhti

  ‘I don’t doubt it,’ I said, with eyes fixed on the road.

  I did doubt it.

  ‘I’m telling you. I know for a fact,’ said Basil, ‘it wasn’t him.’

  My father had ordered me never to bring it up again to anyone, including himself. I never spoke of Adel or the T-54 or Abou Abbas, even to my mother and sister. Everyone who came to visit him at the hospital had some idea of what went on that afternoon, but no one knew about the blood, the Azan, that resounding crack, the cockroach and the four or so bullets which I had fired through the roof of the very car I was now driving. More importantly, no one suspected Mr Malik’s involvement: the man whose classes I had trudged through over the past couple of years with gritted teeth and a newly acquired defiance which, to my surprise, he begrudgingly accommodated. Never once was I called out on my willfully disengaged, bordering on disruptive, demeanour. Perhaps even an ex-militiaman like him understood the need for the sons of battered fathers to spread their feathers a little in the face of the aggressors, even if nothing were to come of it, or rather especially because nothing would ever come of it.

  I looked in the rear-view mirror, the cab driver was gone.

  ‘You want to get yourself killed by ISIS or the Americans,’ I said, ‘is that it?’

  He told me that I was naïve, that Estelle always said I was, that he knew I would not understand, that I was a dreamer not a fighter. He said he had supported my dream, believed in me, even when everyone thought I was ridiculous. He said that just because I would never achieve my dream of becoming an astronaut, it didn’t mean that he should not try to achieve his own dream. He said at least his dream was realistic, noble, not selfish and unattainable. He said at least he believed he had something to offer.

  ‘Grow up,’ he said.

  He said he was fighting alongside a dictator not for him. He said he was fighting the terrorists. He said he was fighting for a cause. The dictator would be next, he said. After the terrorists.

  ‘Seriously, grow up,’ he said.

  I found a parallel parking spot by the promenade and had begun to reverse when Basil flung the door open and jumped out of the car in an attempt to help out. The moon was nowhere to be seen.

  ‘Back, back, back, back, back, back, back, back,’ droned Basil with admirable consistency.

  I hit the kerb.

  ‘Stop,’ said Basil, barely suppressing a laugh.

  I laughed too. My laugh was deeper than his.

  ‘I saw this in a movie once,’ said Basil. His hand covered his mouth.

  His hair had begun to recede but it had lost none of its shine. It was gelled back now. He had matured into a handsome man with high cheekbones and thick lips and eyelids which acted as curtains shielding a precious stone or two. He had also grown a goatee. I asked him if it was ironic; he shrugged his shoulders.

  ‘Forward,’ said Basil waving his hands, with the Honda perfectly positioned between the two cars, ‘just a bit more, a bit more, bit more, more.’

  I slammed my foot against the gas pedal and the Honda crashed hard into the Chevrolet in front of it. The glove compartment flung open and a batch of cassette tapes, which I was not aware of, fell onto the floor. Basil howled, he lowered his hand from his mouth and knocked his head back. The sound of his laughter was louder and shriller than that of the Chevrolet’s car alarm. He hopped back in and we found a quieter parking spot.

  We leaned against the rusted blue railings, each holding a bottle of Almaza. Basil scratched at the label then at the peeling blue paint. There before us again was Gibraltar. Behind us was the palm tree, the one my uncles had played hide and seek around, or some other palm tree. It looked young. Younger than the civil war.

  Basil lit a Cedars and offered me one. I thought of Yuri Gagarin. Much later, I would come across a little known picture of Gagarin smoking a Papirosa, a cheap Russian cigarette with no filter.

  I drank Almaza and smoked Cedars and coughed and spat out phlegm and when I gazed at the sea I could scarcely make out the Rawche Rock.

  ‘Come with me,’ Basil said, his eyes struggling to make out Nicosia.

  ‘And do what?’ I said.

  ‘Fight,’ he said.

  ‘I can’t see it.’

  ‘Report. Be a journalist,’ said Basil, ‘remember that article you wrote once. That was alright.’

  ‘There’s nothing for me there.’

  ‘Your father would completely flip, Gagarin.’

  He had not called me that for some time.

  Basil leaned back with his left hand on the railing and looked up. Then he swung his right arm and let the bottle slip from his fingers. It flew farther than we both had anticipated and landed so far away in the Mediterranean that two Cypriots reported a UFO that night and twelve Sicilians thought it was the second coming of Jesus Christ and three Spaniards shouted ‘Hijo de puta!’ and heard the blop as it sank away. Basil turned his head towards me, opening his dark eyes wide as his greasy, oily, royal hair fell onto his face.

  ‘You astronauts,’ he continued, straining to open another bottle of Almaza for himself using his lighter, ‘you see the world and nothing in it.’

  He bit his lower lip.

  I felt a sharp tug on my elbow. It was a woman in a burka carrying an unwashed infant in one hand and a single packet of Chicklets in another which she kept rattling to the infant’s amusement. Basil handed her a thousand lira note.

  ‘God keep your parents,’ she said in a Syrian dialect.

  ‘When do you leave?’

  ‘Not for a while. I’ll finish school. Get my diploma first. Mr Malik says that is important,’ he said, ‘we start training in the south in a couple of weeks.’

  ‘God keep your youth,’ said another woman in a burka who stood behind the first.

  Basil waved them away. Told them that he did not have any money to give them, and that he had spent it all on beer and cigarettes. Then he folded up the sleeves of his light pink shirt and I could clearly see the spinning swastika as he strained to open the bottle. Wristbands, both cloth and rubber, hung around his left wrist. No watch.

  One wristband in particular stood out. At first, I mistook it for a rainbow of sorts. I quickly realised that it was familiar, that I had seen it before. I did not initially understand what it stood for and it was not until sometime later, after the complete collapse of my father’s ‘Berlin Wall’, when I spent that uninterrupted night in our house on Sadat Street swimming amongst the books, drowning in their pages, that I accidentally came to understand the meaning of the rainbow bracelet, having literally stumbled upon a book about Druze symbolism. And it was not until then that I recalled how Basil had refused to take it off when we were at the beach or even when he was taking a shower. It was strange for me to come to terms with this idea of Basil as man of some faith, any faith, no matter how small it may have been. I believe still that it was sentimentality, as opposed to any real religious conviction, which kept the wristband permanently around his wrist.

  The green stood for the universal mind, or so the book about Druze symbolism declared, the red for the universal soul, the yellow for the word, blue for the past and white for the future.

  I smiled then pursed my lips. He smiled back.

  ‘Why don’t you get a tattoo of a cedar tree to go along with that spinning swastika?’ I asked.

  ‘The cedar tree was chosen by the French colonialists. The first flag of the “Lebanese republic” was the French one with the cedar tree in the middle,’ he said, flicking his unfinished cigarette into the sea and lighting another. ‘And it’s not a spinning swastika. It’s a vortex.’

  There is a line in the Bible, which Teta Mary would read to me in my younger years, about the righteous man flourishing ‘like the palm tree and growing like a cedar in Lebanon’.

  I raised my bottle of Almaza and Basil raised his.

  ‘It’s a swastika however which way you spin it,’ I said, as the two bottles came together.

  ‘Were those your wor
ds or the words of your father?’ he asked, and he gave me a wink.

  ‘His,’ I said, dropping the cigarette butt onto the floor and stepping on it.

  Basil shook his head then he laughed then he shook his head some more.

  ‘I think in a previous life your father and I were good friends.’

  I imagined the swastika spinning right where I had stood that night by the sea, searching in vain for blond and blue-eyed men and finding only tanned, dark skinned, thick browed, black-eyed men staring back at it. Where am I? It would ask.

  ‘Stay here,’ I said.

  ‘I’ve made up my mind, son of life,’ he said.

  ‘Alright.’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘Fine.’

  ‘Do you believe in this Arab Spring that everyone’s talking about now?’

  ‘You’re the one going off to fight a war that is not yours, not me.’

  ‘Do you?’ he insisted.

  ‘No, I suppose not. Maybe,’ I paused, searching his face for clues, ‘maybe not. Do you?’

  ‘I don’t know. Sometimes I do, when it is not raining outside and the weather is not humid, not so warm that the asphalt melts beneath the soles of your shoes, just a light breeze and you can smell the cypress trees and foliage around the old houses with the red-brick roof and the hollowed out buildings and you can feel the sun on the back of your neck but only in as much as you want to feel it, and only in as much as it wants to be felt. And early in the morning, always early in the morning but not before the call to prayer.’

  ‘Isn’t that just spring?’ I asked, taken aback by the sincerity of his musings.

  ‘It is,’ he stared at my mouth as if it and not I was responsible for my words. ‘Isn’t that what we were talking about?’

  Then, I told Basil about Bilyasho. I had never shared my father’s stories with him. I chose the lighter ending.

  ‘You should learn to take things lightly, Don. You’ll lose your hair if you carry on like this,’ I said.

  I put on a high-pitched voice and I blinked repeatedly. It was my best impression of a young boy with red hair and freckles whom I had never met.

  ‘A Lebanese boy with red hair?’ asked Basil.

  Basil turned his back on the Mediterranean and leaned his elbows against the railings. He ran his fingers through his oily hair.

  ‘Aren’t you afraid?’ I asked.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Alright.’

  ‘I could always come back if I wanted to.’ He looked up in that same way my father would look up as we hid from the bullets and the bombs in the bathroom.

  ‘To life?’

  He laughed.

  ‘To Beirut,’ he said.

  Then I started spinning on the spot; I extended my arms out and started whirling like a Sufi.

  ‘Stop whirling like a Sufi,’ said Basil, with a snort.

  I did not know why I was spinning. I did not know much about the Sufis either. I knew that they are a sect of Islam which does a lot of whirling as a form of meditation. This whirling, Mr Malik had explained, is a means to achieve a higher form of enlightenment, to be in touch with the ‘perfect man’ spiritually.

  As I spun, I saw nothing, and if there was a perfect man then I must have missed him or he must have missed me, and I did not know which way to look, for when I looked west onto the sea I worried that he might have drowned on the way; and when I looked east onto Beirut, I worried that he might have been shot because he was in the way, and pretty soon I could not tell east from west nor north from south and I imagined that this was how it must feel like to be perpetually falling into a black hole.

  ‘What are you doing?’ came the echo of Basil’s voice.

  And I knew that Mr Malik had little to do with Adel’s attack on my father. The tattoo on Adel’s arm, his youthful zest, his lack of education, his inexperience with an AK-47, that other militaman’s unmistakably mountain Druze accent, those were not the hallmarks of the older man’s influence. And that face, Adel’s face. I realised that I had encountered it intermittently after school in amongst a crowd of other faces which would wait by the school gate for Basil to emerge. It was younger then, fuller, a little pudgy even and it rested on a shorter body.

  When Beirut stopped spinning I saw Basil and his Almaza.

  THE ASTRONAUT

  ‘To Syria?’ my father raged. ‘You want to go to Syria?’

  He launched the nearest book he could find in my direction. I ducked and it smashed against the shelf in the living room knocking the graduation picture onto the ground and shattering the frame again. It was titled The Literature of the Lebanese Diaspora: Representations of Place and Transnational Identity.

  My mother and sister came rushing in. My sister’s hair was almost apologetically curly and she had from time to time, begun to wear one ponytail instead of two.

  ‘Your son thinks he is an upper middle class European white boy,’ shouted my father.

  ‘What?’ asked my mother.

  ‘He wants to go on an adventure in Syria.’

  I explained that I wanted to be a journalist, a reporter. I said I wanted to cover issues that matter.

  ‘There are plenty of those here,’ said my mother, ‘I did not raise you so that you would go chasing the war.’

  I said I wanted to go to Syria, cover the war.

  ‘Go to Thailand,’ he said, flinching or winking to himself. ‘Cover the mistreatment of elephants.’

  ‘What are you saying?’ she asked, her eyes pleading with mine as she sat down on the ground.

  ‘They’re majestic creatures,’ he said. ‘They whip them every day. It’s a travesty.’

  ‘How would you even get there?’

  ‘I’m going,’ I said.

  Silence. No gunshots. Just silence.

  ‘It is that Druze boy, isn’t it?’ he howled.

  I said that I did not necessarily have to go to Syria at first. I would work my way up through the newspaper then gradually make my way there.

  ‘Don’t be stupid,’ said my sister, scratching her chest. ‘Why are you being stupid?’

  ‘Go, leave, then,’ he said, ‘show me how you are going to march into a war zone armed with your unsharpened pencil.’

  I had long since learned to resent my singular An-Nahar article and the manner in which my father would weaponize the words of my younger self for his purposes.

  ‘I will,’ I said, as I turned my back on him.

  My father flung another book towards me. I felt a sharp pain in the back of my shoulder as The Arab Spring Today landed with precision. Then he got up and limped past the towering blocks of literature. He reached for a book behind the wall shielding the bookshelves from the outside world. For a while, my sister, my mother and I observed as he struggled to fit his hand through the window of space which he had created for himself. Then the ground shook, my mother and sister ducked and the wall came tumbling down.

  He grabbed a falling book in midair and hurled it at my nose, then he reached for another and he aimed that one at my chest. This went on for some time. The wall, the bookshelves, the towers, even the floor came alive. The books leaped out of their place, and launched themselves in all directions. Some books rose out of the ground and smashed against the ceiling and fell back down. Some twirled eastward, others twisted and turned westward. A few of them crashed into one another, their pages interweaving, their covers falling back to release the ink and the paper and that distinct smell of the old: old books, old furniture, old men. The walls collapsed, the room danced, shifted and grew, contracted and expanded, so that I doubt even my father could still make sense of that random grand pattern.

  ‘Read,’ he barked, spit flying from his mouth.

  I dodged Syria Under Islam, I skipped past The Rise of Assad, I sidestepped Syria and Iran, I flinched when The Cedar Revolution and the Consequences in Syria flew past my left ear, I winced when Lebanon Under Occupation smacked against my ribs, I screamed when Your Syria and My Lebanon made contact
with my forehead. I sat on the floor and I felt warm blood make its way past my right eyebrow and I shut my right eye and I placed my right hand over my head and I wrapped my left arm around my legs and I heard my mother plead with my father to stop and I heard my sister wrestle a book or two off him. I heard my father order her to stop biting him.

  ‘Stop biting me, Fara,’ he exclaimed, struggling to push her aside with his free hand, ‘stop biting me, I said.’

  ‘That’s enough,’ said my mother, her strength and that of my sister now overwhelming my father.

  My father’s moustache remained a curious black, well into his sixties. His hair eventually turned grey then white then, to everyone’s relief, began to fall out. He fought it at first. There was a point when his hair was brown, his moustache black, his stubble white and his eyebrows peppered with grey, and I wondered whether he might now wear blue contact lenses in one eye to complete the abstract self-portrait that his face had become. I suggested this to my mother and she giggled and told me not to repeat it to my father because it might hurt his feelings. Then she corrected herself.

  ‘It might hurt his pride,’ she said.

  I walked into my parent’s bedroom one evening, years before Monsieur Mermier moved into the opposite flat, hoping to find my father sprawled on the bed with his An-Nahar shielding his face. I did not. Instead, lying on my father’s nightstand, I found a small diamond-shaped plastic box with a protruding sponge on the end of it. Impracticality aside, it looked like it belonged more in a shoe shiner’s tool bag than amongst the toiletries. It was without colour, without odour, without brand. A plain white label read ‘Brown hair’. I lifted the bottle closer to my eye level then against the light. It was unopened. Beneath it was a lottery ticket and beside it was a hastily folded newspaper. I tucked the lottery ticket into my back pocket and left everything else as it was. I saw my father turn over newspapers and books, I saw him crouch on his hands and knees to look under that comfortable couch in the living room, swearing and patting his shirt pocket as he stood up. He glanced at me, acknowledging my brown hair, but I did not ask what he was looking for and he did not ask if I had seen it.