The School of War

by Najjar, Alexandre; Wilson, Laurie;

  ‘And who’s going to pay for the window?’

  I hand him two more bills, which he shoves into the pocket of his sweat-soaked shirt. I step out onto the ground and walk around the taxi to assess the damage. A bullet is embedded just inches from the gas tank.

  ‘It’s divine providence,’ I say.

  ‘No,’ Moussa replies, pointing to the little white shoe swinging next to the exhaust pipe. ‘It’s Rachid’s shoe.’

  The Barber

  ‘It’s been a long time.’

  ‘I’ve been in Europe …’

  ‘Ah, Europe!’

  Here we go again … The barber is the same as ever. His boisterousness used to exasperate me. Today I find it comforting – it reassures me that time hasn’t really changed the men in this country. During the war, at the first light of dawn, even before the newspaper seller began his day, the old men in the neighbourhood would gather in the barber shop to get the latest news from the front. The barber turns his back to them. Facing the big mirror that reflects his image, with that of his audience sitting on straw-bottomed stools in the background, he sets to work. He ties the pink smock he has draped over me around my neck, runs his expert fingers through my hair, rotates my chair – a spacious chair with leather arms, perched on a rotating pedestal – and tilts it back towards the sink. I end up with my head in the water and my feet in the air. I close my eyes. With one hand, the barber pours the shampoo onto my scalp – ah, that apple-scented shampoo, still the same as the day my father made me climb up onto this promontory for my first haircut. With the other hand, he rubs my hair. The smooth lather builds up as the water runs. ‘Is the temperature OK?’ he asks. ‘Yes, it’s just fine,’ I say softly, wiping away the liquid that drips down my temples. He rinses my hair thoroughly, towels it dry vigorously, tilts the chair upright, spins it back around, takes the pair of scissors his apprentice hands to him, then starts to trim the stubborn strands that lie across my forehead. I open my eyes.

  ‘Chou fi ma fi?’

  The sacramental words have been spoken. Behind me, someone has just asked the usual question: ‘What’s new?’ The barber nods his head with a knowing look. Here we go again … Without turning towards the others, whose reactions are displayed in the mirror, he paints a panorama of the political and military situation, evaluates the morale of the troops, lists the casualties from the day before, reports the warlords’ latest confidences … Before an audience that he has already won over, he proposes his analysis of the events. Where does he get his information? Is it the figment of an active imagination? Is it trustworthy? My eyelids grow heavy; soothed by the ‘snip-snip’ of the scissors, I let myself go … ‘I don’t think it would be premature to envision a truce in the near future …’ Each of his sentences is carefully weighed: they apprise without committing their speaker, and inform without compromising him. ‘France may very well intervene. But ever since de Gaulle left France isn’t what it used to be.’ Sometimes his tone changes, becomes more assertive: ‘You’ll see, the war will go on for a hundred years.’ The barber knows what he is doing – just as his customer’s muscles begin to relax, he overdoes it. The result is guaranteed: the customer jumps, begins to worry, opens his eyes wide. ‘A hundred years? You really think so?’ The scissors move around his ear, shave close to his neck … The barber elaborates. Words come out of his mouth in sync with the falling hair that the apprentice sweeps up into his dustpan.

  Loving

  Newspapers, books and other assorted objects are piled high in the attic. Stepping into this mouldy odour, I have descended into my past. I used to like to play in this place that was miraculously left untouched by the shells that hit my family home. I look around me: toys, photo albums, a stroller, a table-football game, two bicycles … My entire childhood is here, enclosed in this space. On a shelf, next to a string of onions, I see a small studded case. I wipe off the film of dust that has collected on it and cautiously lift the lid. They are still here. Dozens of letters, each folded in four, carefully arranged, love letters that Ghada used to send to me. I would read them in secret … Between her house and mine, the ‘ring’, the bridge of disunion. When the fighting would escalate and no one dared travel back and forth, I would sulk – how were we to overcome this absence when shells rendered all communication between the two parts of the capital impossible? The telephone? I spent hours dialing her number, in vain.

  One morning a friend who worked for the Red Cross offered to put me in contact with her.

  ‘Write to her – I’ll deliver it.’

  ‘How will you manage to get to the other side?’

  ‘Until further notice, they aren’t firing at ambulances.’ he replied with a wink.

  From then on I started writing torrid love letters, melancholy and full of hope. Ghada replied. In black ink, on blue paper, she wrote passionate letters that I kept like jewels in this case she gave me for my sixteenth birthday …

  I pull out a letter at random and unfold it. It sends a shiver through my body. God, these letters bring back memories:

  My love,

  I am counting the hours that separate me from peace so I can finally see you again and take you in my arms. I hunger for you, I need your gaze, your smile, your fragrance …

  I hear explosions. The war, still and always. Shells are falling and I don’t know if they are falling on you. I wish … I wish I were an angel, a bird, so I could fly over that bridge of death, that bridge of shame that keeps me from you! I am afraid, my love. Afraid of dying far from you, of leaving this world all alone. Heaven? I don’t want it if you aren’t there! If we were together, you and I, holding each other close, we would be strong, indestructible. But here, one without the other, we are defenseless, unarmed, vulnerable!

  I hear ‘launchings’. Yet again, it is the gun from the barracks across the street being unleashed. The shells are going to crash down on your neighbourhood, on your street, on your house, maybe. And here I am, powerless, unable to defend you, on my knees. I pray … I pray that the gunner miscalculate, that he miss his target, that the shells plunge into the sea without causing any damage … And I impatiently await the end of this war that drags on.

  In your last letter, you wrote that you were suffocating, that you couldn’t take it any longer. You must be strong, my love. You must resist. We too are resistance fighters, in our own way. If the war is the enemy of love, then we will be the Resistance fighters of love!

  It will not defeat us.

  Under Fire

  Byblos. Sitting by the sea, I breathe in deeply. The sun, the sand, the palm trees, the girls in bikinis, the fragrance of the sea and suntan oil …

  An explosion jolts me out of my reverie. Everyone panics.

  ‘What’s going on? Was that a shell?’

  The lifeguard – bronzed skin, chest thrust out, muscles flexed – circulates among the sunbathers, reassuring them:

  ‘It’s nothing, it’s for a movie. The military pyrotechnicians forewarned us.’

  ‘A movie?’

  ‘A movie about the war, filmed by a Bulgarian.’

  ‘Yélaan abou!’

  I let the curse slip out. Can’t we sunbathe in peace? I look around me. The spell has been broken – the glaring sun is too strong, the sand is strewn with trash, the palm trees are dishevelled, the girls are callipygian, and the air reeks of fried food. I am upset with myself for having lost my touch, for having let my weaponry-recognition skills slip, for not having been able to distinguish between the blast of a mock explosive device and that of a shell. It used to be child’s play for me:

  ‘Is that a “launching” or a “landing”?’ everyone would ask me.

  I would put my finger to my lips to demand silence, furrow my brow to look more important, and cup my hand around my ear.

  ‘It’s a “launching” – our guys are bombing.

  Or:

  ‘It’s a “landing” – we’re under fire! Everyone take shelter!’

  As the war dragged on, I hone
d my skills, to the point that before long I could identify the nature of the weapons being used: ‘Those are Stalin organs … That’s a 240mm gun … That’s just a rocket … Those are Grad missiles …’ My family admired my capabilities; the youngest kids thought I was some kind of soothsayer.

  My information was supplemented by the precious advice of a schoolteacher who, when a truce made it possible for us to go to school, took it upon himself to inculcate us with the Ten Steps to Better Survival. He taught us the art of taking shelter, of criss-crossing the window panes with tape to prevent glass shards in case of an explosion, to seek out possible hiding places while walking down the street in case of a surprise attack, to stock up on supplies during shortages … He taught us the ‘three methods for building barricades’:

  1. Classic barricades, built with sandbags. ‘The main drawback,’ he warned us, ‘is that they are messy when it rains.’

  2. Barricades made from cinder blocks, carefully aligned along the area to be protected. ‘It’s solid,’ he assured us, ‘but rather expensive.’

  3. Barricades built out of old tyres, easy to dismantle but more dangerous than the preceding barricades because there was a risk of their catching fire.

  He handed out a pamphlet, the contents of which I learned by heart:

  There is no one neighbourhood in Beirut, no one building in a neighbourhood, no one bedroom in a building – not any longer – that is less exposed than the others. The danger is now the same everywhere. Move only if it is to put a greater number of ceilings and floors between yourself and the sky. Thus far, a bomb has never passed through more than three floors. Draw your own conclusion.

  A thickness of a few inches of wood or cotton does not offer much resistance to a hundred pounds of steel. This is a word of advice to those who hide under their tables or their beds when they are frightened.

  Getting upset will do nothing to protect you from danger. If the nocturnal din keeps you from sleeping, put some cotton in your ears and take a sleeping pill – two precautionary measures are better than one. And if your house collapses, there is still a chance that you will awaken.

  I later learned that this advice was taken from a press release that had been published on the front page of a daily French-language Lebanese newspaper at the time of the fighting between the Anglo-Gaullist forces and the Vichy troops in the Middle East. It didn’t teach us anything new, but to its credit it raised our survival instinct to the status of precepts.

  I was occasionally mistaken, however. One day, while my entire family was leisurely having breakfast, an explosion shook the house:

  “Launching” or “landing”?’ my mother asked me, jumping to her feet. Caught off-guard, I hazarded a guess:

  ‘It was a launching. Our guys are bombing!’

  My mother put her hand over her heart to calm its beating, then sat back down.

  Ten seconds later a salvo of shells crashed around our house and, panicking, we rushed down to the basement – a cramped basement, the entrance of which was blocked by a tottering door. Huddled up against one another, sick with fear, we remained shut in there for two hours, our eyes glued to the door that was keeping Death out, but that the least explosion might blow off its hinges.

  A cease-fire was finally announced on the radio. Glad to still be alive, we left the basement to assess the damage. My mother grabbed me by the elbow and pulled me aside.

  ‘That wasn’t a launching,’ she said through clenched teeth.

  Home-schooling

  Early one morning, seeing the neighbour’s son climb onto the bus wearing a cumbersome backpack, I slapped my forehead. School! The smell of new books the first day back, the desks we would carve pictures into, the chalk dust floating in the air, the ringing of the bell that set us free, the playground whose every nook and cranny we knew by heart … I have never entirely left school. Some nights I wake with a start from a dream about the following day’s exam; I forget that there are no more exams and that I have made it past that turning point.

  During the war, our school was often closed because of bombardments. That meant long vacations, vacations that could go on for six months. Then, thanks to a lull, we would once again be on the school benches. That was quite an ordeal – we had to wean ourselves from idleness, recall how to study, leave behind our card games and our children’s games …

  More than once the school itself changed location. That made us feel like we were gypsies and our wagon was the school, studying in a different place every day. The school left Beirut for the suburbs; a shell fell onto the playground. It moved further from the capital; the gunner located it and made this fact known. So the desks and chalkboards were hauled to Bickfaya, to a convent lost somewhere in the countryside … The bus drivers in charge of picking up the kids took senseless risks. They drove at breakneck speed to avoid the snipers’ bullets and slalomed through the alleyways, fleeing the bombardments …

  Confused, parents no longer knew whether they were to follow the school or whether the school should be near where they lived. As a result, a number of kids changed schools like they changed shirts, depending where their parents found refuge. One of my friends had such irregular schooling that he can pride himself on having attended seventeen different schools.

  To deal with the situation, my mother resolved to start a school at home. She ordered a chalkboard from the carpenter, bought boxes of chalk and set up round tables in the living room. Teachers would come in the afternoon to teach us Arabic, French, English and maths, and the kids were placed according to their level. Before long, friends and neighbours joined us, to the point that there ended up being as many as fifteen pupils at the ‘Home-School’. My mother was in charge of managing things. As ‘principal’ she took care of setting up the curriculum, verifying that the school ran smoothly, and punishing the problem kids. To make up for the lack of teachers in certain subjects, she taught the history, geography, biology, catechism and physical education classes herself … I have unforgettable memories of biology class. My mother ordered a lamb’s heart and brain from the butcher, and gathered frogs and snails in the yard. Using these as visual aids, she explained how the organs or animals functioned, sometimes getting so carried away that she would dissect them, following the instructions in our science book. One day, the jar in which she was storing the two green frogs that were to be her guinea pigs mysteriously opened, and the entire class spent the afternoon searching for the two fugitives under the couches. As for physical education, it was reduced to the very basics. Without a stadium or a gym, we were limited to doing somersaults in the yard …

  What was to be temporary lasted for an entire year. We took and passed the school exam – the real one – and were admitted to the next grade the following year. Once we were back in school, we had the hardest time clearing our minds of recess in the yard, the cookies Aunt Malaké passed around, and the classroom, with the chalkboard perched on the television set and the pieces of white chalk on the end table. The sight of the principal was enough to stir our nostalgia – with his big belly, the thin beard around his jawline and his yellow teeth, he was nothing like my dear mother.

  The Bullet

  As I pass through the metal detector at Orly airport for flight 128 to Beirut, a red light comes on accompanied by a screeching whistle.

  ‘Empty your pockets, sir,’ the security officer orders.

  I put the contents of my pockets into a basket in front of him: a set of keys, some business cards, a crumpled Kleenex, three twenty-centime pieces and a Metro ticket.

  ‘Is that everything?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Step through again.’

  I do as ordered. The light comes on, the alarm goes off. The security officer frisks me from head to toe and back up again. He feels my pockets and once again asks me to step through the detector. The result is the same.

  ‘Would you happen to be carrying any metal objects?’ he asks me, exasperated.

  I pull an X-ray out of my hand lugga
ge.

  ‘What’s this?’

  ‘The answer to your question.’

  The security officer takes the X-ray, turns toward the window, and holds it up to the light. There is a shiny object in the middle of the negative.

  ‘That’s funny,’ he says, scratching his head, ‘it looks like a bullet.’

  I am a survivor. I have a bullet lodged in my chest, even with my heart, but on the right side. It is henceforth an integral part of my organism. I can’t feel it, but it is indeed present, embedded in my thorax.

  How did it get there? It all started on April 13, 1978. The bus that was taking us home from school was stopped in the suburbs of Beirut – at the Galerie Semaan-Chiyah highway – by a group of young people in combat uniforms who were selling their party’s newspaper to drivers. I remember the scene clearly:

  ‘Do you want one?’ the militiaman asks the bus driver.

  ‘No thank you,’ he replies, shaking his head.

  ‘Everyone buys one,’ the militiaman replies.

  ‘You aren’t actually going to sell your rag to schoolchildren?’

  ‘What? Say that again, you son-of-a-bitch.’

  Sitting at the back of the bus, I straighten up in my seat and watch the militiaman raise his index finger, challenging him. Losing patience, the driver speeds away. He drives past the young man who, enraged, opens fire. A shower of projectiles hits the body of the vehicle. A bullet pierces through the seatback of the bench I am sitting on and ends its flight in my thorax. Blood spews from me in the midst of screams. The windshield shatters. I pass out … A few hours pass before I open my eyes again, at the Hôtel-Dieu de France. I am lying on the operating table, beneath a blinding cross-shaped spotlight. A surgeon and two nurses are bustling around me.

  ‘Your son is out of danger, but we weren’t able to remove the bullet.’

  ‘Will he live?’ my mother asks in a worried voice.