Oliver of the Levant

by Debra Jopson

  My success with Mr Stickler didn’t last. He was livid when I finally delivered the mice back to the lab. We were short on whites.

  ‘Heaps escaped, but I got the experiments in before the breakout.’

  His face dimpled in disbelief. ‘Lawrence, you’ve committed scientific fraud.’

  I shrugged. ‘Genetics is all theory, anyway.’

  ‘You may think so. I’m wondering which ancestor handed you the glib liar gene.’

  He wrote a note home. I intercepted it. Dad and Babette might have taken it out on the mice. They’d become tired of the tiny terrorists living in the hole-cracks of our apartment and of having to pretend that the mice didn’t exist, even as the whiskery braves dashed after crumbs dropped by guests, who eeked and lifted their feet.

  Dad said they were like the Phalangists and Palestinian commandos who’d recently outraged Beirut by sniping at each other across Place des Martyrs. ‘You think they’ve retreated and, suddenly, they’re out and at it again, in public.’

  Souhar threatened to poison the mice. I tried to catch some to save their miniature hides, gathering empty food tins covered with pictures of tomatoes, chickpeas and olive oil, which I stuffed with tempting pieces of cold melted cheese on toast and laid beside the mouse-holes. My prey eluded me.

  Souhar harrumphed. ‘I bring Mahmoud one day. He shoot them.’ I wished she would. Whenever I asked where he was, she would only say, ‘Away.’

  So I was grateful when Walid rescued me from a weekend of tedium by giving me work as his assistant in his new photographic business. Dad agreed, grumping that I was finally doing something useful.

  Babette encouraged me. ‘It’s perfect for you. You’ll be a David Bailey, a Snowden … a magician of light.’ But, mostly, I was a pack-horse, helping Walid haul tripods, flashes, reflective umbrellas and other paraphernalia to weddings, christenings and birthdays all over Lebanon. And putting up with his joke: ‘We shoot brides and babies – and it’s legal.’

  He paid me a shop assistant’s wage of two hundred Lebanese pounds a month. And he got to flirt with Babette. It seemed safe if I stayed vigilant. He would only stay a short time with her before we whirled away in his red Audi, up to the Chouf Mountains, down to Sidon, north to Jounieh. Elsewhere.

  Walid would let me drive, even though I didn’t have a licence. I folded money into a belly dancer’s jewelled waist at a wedding party in a Bedouin tent. I held light meters in the spicy swirl of cinnamon, cedar and sandalwood smoke at baptisms, where wet babies shouted at the shock of water and flashlight pops. I held reflective umbrellas over brides after they’d queued in their long, snowy gowns for filthy squatter toilets, tipping women who’d handed them folds of toilet paper.

  Walid worked with fast shutter speeds. He leapt about his subjects, his jutting lens making him a big-eyed bug. I shadowed him, following his progress through the sound: tshew, tshew, tshew, tshew, tshew.

  He gave me an old Nikon camera when he got a gig to shoot an Arab prince’s birthday party at the Casino du Liban. The squat prince in a regal headdress drank whiskey through the whole show, staged just for him.

  The set was a fantasy sheikh’s tent. I lifted my lens to the guy acting the sheikh, who sat on a massive cushion under a purple fez, puffing on a nargilah with striped tubes leading to two giant hourglass-shaped jars filled with water. Two bare-bellied genies somersaulted inside them every time the sheikh’s exhalation bubbled in the water, turning to the rhythm of his breath. They could only gulp air when their faces reached the tops of the jar.

  His voice boomed: ‘Behold, the women who dance to their bald master for your pleasure. They beat out time, each breath recalling how precious is life. May you laugh until you die.’ He cackled.

  With my eye at the camera, I shrank the world down to a rectangle the size of the jar top, where I caught the troubled eye and gasping mouth of a genie. Snap. Then the prince. Snap. His face vacant in the flicker of a candle.

  Drum roll. Points of starlight fluttered in the ceiling. Thunderous music rolled into the room. Out of a mist puffed from the wings, six palomino horses galloped in, pressed forward by the vibrating knees of men in red turbans, their hooves beating on rotating drum barrels that held them like a mirage. Snap. I caught nostril steam and fingers clamped in fluttering manes.

  ‘You’ve got a good eye.’ Walid smiled when he developed my film. ‘Keep going. Make a portfolio.’

  Tricky fingers. I frame a piece of the world and I decree what people will see.

  But when the pock-pock-pock of fighting came over the hill to the Corniche, I had to stay in the Paramount prison again, with Jess and Babette. A warlord had died on a sidewalk and his followers wanted revenge. Bullets flew in the air for days. The spaces between buildings echoed with ambulance sirens. In the fields above the quarry, women in kaftans fell to their knees, clenched their fists and squawked like seagulls. Tracer bullets drew pink lines across the sky. Below my window, the body of a man lay at the top of the quarry. I trained a long lens on the blood dribble over an eye, which opened. I snapped and then the eye froze. I threw my camera onto the bed and covered my face with my fingers.

  Don’t let me see death again.

  Still, I peeped, when the moon rose. His outline was still there. It was gone in the morning. I didn’t develop the film containing his image, but I couldn’t throw it away. I spooked myself into thinking that, by holding onto it, I kept him alive.

  One Sunday that October, Walid took me to Beit Zizi for coffee with his mother. As I drove, he announced, ‘I am going to explain the root of minus one to you.’

  I glared at him. ‘How do you know what I think about the root of minus one?’

  ‘As Jess says, “Everybody in Lebanon knows.”’ Walid waved his hand. ‘It has a name, of course. It is i, which means imaginary number.’

  ‘Imaginary. Exactly. It doesn’t exist.’ I took both hands from the wheel and shook them at him.

  ‘No, it doesn’t, but at the same time it does, because it’s useful, like the number one. It would be useful if you’d hold the wheel, Oliver.’

  ‘Being useful is not the same as being real.’

  ‘Numbers only exist for us to use. Imagine life without zero, another brilliant Arab contribution to civilisation. You must have zero to be able to arrive at a negative. Once you have switched your mind into understanding that there are negative numbers, beyond zero, you can apply the same laws to the negative numbers as the positive. Where would our physics be without this arithmetic? We would not know how to fly. You would still be in Australia, instead of here, having all this fun.’ He whacked my arm with the back of his hand, making me grunt like Dad.

  In his village, he pointed out a stone house with an open-air rooftop shaded by dried palm branches. ‘This is where Sabine will live after she’s married. They’ll hang the sheet with blood there, under the fronds.’

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘To prove she’s a virgin. It’s still a little barbaric in these parts.’

  Why does she have to bleed?

  ‘I don’t get how she can marry her cousin.’

  ‘Tradition. Ah, Oliver, how lucky you are to have escaped being born into a family which sees itself as a body, with each member a thumb, a finger, or a toe.’

  ‘No-one would want my family.’

  He shook my shoulder. ‘You give Babette strength.’ Hot pins and needles of jealousy flashed through my body, leaving me weak.

  Did they speak about me?

  I made a fruitless search of Madame Khoury’s house for a photo of Sabine. There were only pictures of the saints in her hallway, where I waited while she and Walid talked in rhythmic Arabic. I recognised a word here or there – Libnain, Lebanon, Falesteen, Palestine and our name, Lawrence. Walid emerged, worrying at his moustache with his fingers.

  ‘Sorry, Oliver, but I can’t leave right now. My mother is threatening to move to Paris. She’s alone and feels vulnerable. We have to discuss this a little further.’


  He lent me his best Nikon, usually not mine, even to touch. Swelling with a sense of enterprise, I walked along a gravel road above a grassy slope into the nearby forest, searching for pictures to make. I stopped, foot above the crackling undergrowth, my heart skittering as the pock-pock of gunshots crackled through the cool air. But my eye caught bright pinks and yellows; kids flitting between tree trunks and giggling in the dappled light. Near them, a group of women were sprawled over a picnic rug, chatting. They went quiet when they saw me with the camera.

  ‘Ex-excuse me. Are there guns here?’

  They ignored my question and pretended to pose like movie stars, laughing into each other’s eyes. When I lifted my lens, they hid their faces.

  ‘Go.’ One of the women urged me with a wave towards the shooting sounds.

  I made my fingers into a trigger and pretended to shoot my temple with it. ‘You want to get me killed?’

  She grinned, tilted her head and mimed taking a photo, encouraging me on. My heart was clanging as I crunched through leaves, especially when I saw three men in a clearing, dressed like film-set extras in vests, tweed jackets and leather shoes. A man with a wide belly, thinning hair and a mouth that moved like a cartoon frog’s spotted me and beckoned. ‘Hey, welcome. Come here … We shoot bird only. Don’t worry. We shoot no mens. You take picture?’

  I nodded. He showed me his gun with silver scribble on its butt, as well as a bunch of small birds that they had shot and tied together by the neck. The men posed with stiff, straight backs, but the stillness was broken when one bird in the frog-mouthed man’s feathery bundle, blood streaking one wing, twitched and struggled. His elbow strained at the weight. I zoomed in on the cluster of dumb, tiny beaks pressed together. Tschk.

  As long as I promised to stay upwind, the men let me follow them under the trembling canopy while they blasted quails and turtle doves. The lens had to swoop and circle to capture the men’s swift pivots and the flurry of their prey. I could feel myself becoming a part of the camera, everything else falling away. I’d forgotten about Walid until I heard his worried voice, calling from the forest’s edge.

  ‘Coming.’ The men flashed angry looks as a flock of birds rose at my shout. But still, they wanted my phone number.

  ‘We buy your photos.’ My first sale. To Mr Frogmouth.

  ‘Do you eat these birds?’

  ‘It’s not for the meat. It’s for the heartbeat.’

  My new customer hung the bloody bird bouquet by a rope from his car side mirror for their last flight down the hill, back to Beirut.

  Walid said, ‘They’ll gut and decapitate them, then stuff the heads into the stomachs and toss them on the barbecue.’

  ‘Erk.’

  ‘Delicious, actually. I prefer them fried. More crunch.’

  Walid became chatty as I drove his Audi through Beit Zizi. ‘I could’ve taken those birds. The men were shooting on our village land. But they didn’t go anywhere near my father’s grave. No harm done, so I let them go.’ We passed Sabine’s future home, empty, waiting. ‘Abdo wouldn’t have let them get away. He’d have cut off their noses and strung them from his rooftop.’

  My hands trembled on the wheel. ‘Where they’re going to hang the sheets.’

  ‘Yes, mate, unless Sabine agrees to run off with you.’

  28

  Knots of Nothingness

  Souhar scrubbed our apartment as if it was filthy with blood. She yelled the news, spraying spittle. Some Palestinians had gone up to Hamra and kidnapped the son of the Christian Kataeb leader. They kept him for most of the day and then set him free.

  ‘These fedayeen are very kind, making peace. They let the man go. But the Lebanese hate us. So, now there is war. Maronites coming to fight fedayeen in the camps, where we live. Hurt children. Hurt mothers.’ She moaned and I gave her one of Dad’s hankies, expecting her to blow into it between her brown hands, but she made a private tent of it over her face and continued to weep.

  The rat-a-tat came back to Beirut in the next few weeks as fighting between the Palestinians and Maronites spread. The Israelis no longer sent a lonely morning jet blasting the sound barrier to remind us of their existence. They sent their soldiers deep inside Lebanon to kill their enemies, sometimes in their beds. The emptiness of the Corniche rose up and filled me.

  Now Souhar crept to our apartment between curfews and cleaned, bowed and black-eyed. ‘Mahmoud run away. I am very afraid he die.’ Her sorrow frightened me. Babette hired a taxi driver to bring Souhar pink roses, which made her cry harder.

  Babette sighed when Souhar had left. ‘There’s nothing I can do. You know Beirut is supposed to be this rich tapestry. We are just little knots of nothingness in it. We come and go and make no difference.’ Her face was pale as waxy glass, and I didn’t know whether she was worried for herself or the Lebanese. A fog of helplessness seemed to have settled over all of us. Babette’s imperious beauty had no power over this.

  I began to follow the news, searching for answers. People flooded into Beirut from the south and were swallowed into suburbs and camps we’d never seen. News reports said that they were running away; Palestinian commandos waged war at the border and the Israelis hit back, making the villages unliveable. No-one cleaned up the photos in the Daily Star of dead people, leaning into the earth, coated in blood and dirt and flies.

  I felt sorry for them, not just because they were dead, but because the way they lost their lives meant that they couldn’t control how people saw them now. The ladies lay with their dresses high above their knees, when they would surely have preferred to wriggle the hems down with their fingers. I wanted to reach into the photos and tuck the men’s rumpled shirts into their trousers. While I was at it, I would close their eyelids and pop their tongues back in, too. They couldn’t do anything for themselves now. Or ever again.

  I flipped through the paper every day, thinking I would see Abu Iyad curled rigid. Or George, with useless, floppy arms. Or Ringo, his final stare fixed in his face.

  At her next visit, Souhar kissed and then slapped my cheek. ‘Mahmoud come home, but now he do nothing. He is lazy boy, like his father.’ I let a breath out. She’d stopped crying, but was now whipping her cleaning rags at dusty surfaces in anger. I tried to persuade her to let me visit him, but she seemed thinner and harder, her face sour, her manner cold. Whenever she saw a mouse zipping into a crack, she thrust angrily at it with her broom handle, in for the kill.

  ‘You can’t see Mahmoud. He lives for fighting now. First he was a cub. Now he is a Fedayi. Once, I thought he would go back to school, learn English, travel somewhere like Australia. But now, when he reads a book, it is about Falesteen. He chooses men like Abu Iyad to be his professors. They teach him war. He plays on the football field at night, but on his belly, pretending to shoot a rocket at the goal he pretend is the border with Falesteen.’

  This confused me. She didn’t approve of her son fighting, but she no longer journeyed south to bring him home. She had also taken to collecting money for a Palestinian group she said would help her family find a home. I thought at first she meant a house. But she meant a country. ‘You see those yehudi Zionist come right inside this country and kill people in their beds? The government does nothing. These Christian Kataeb are very bad. They want to push Palestinians into the sea. How can we live?’

  From the air, landing one of his babies, Dad saw the Palestinians training on the football field in Souhar’s camp. ‘Young blokes. Formed up in lines, disciplined as heck. Hope none of them plan to visit my cockpit any time soon.’

  I needed to find some magic for Ringo. Bigger than a cigar bomb gag, which seemed silly now; a light-hearted trick for another mood, another country. The guy needed something to make him laugh if he had some power-tripper yelling at him all the time.

  29

  Tyre

  Peace crept across the streets and camps as snow coated the mountains. There was endless talk of the Cairo Agreement, which had Dad joking. ‘Time to learn Greek. We may
be headed to Cyprus. Great victory for Arafat. His Palestinian command is in charge of the camps. His people are officially allowed to take up arms against Israel. Whaddya think Israel will do about that? Not to mention the Lebanese Army. It’s not looking pretty.’

  Souhar was ecstatic. ‘A new life begin for us.’

  Dad was off again, flying down in the Gulf for weeks, so it was left to me to stop Walid from taking advantage of the lull in fighting to sneak around with Babette unguarded. She was all quiver and bustle on the phone as they planned a day trip to Tyre in Lebanon’s south, with a taxi driver who’d double as guide.

  I hopped in the front seat.

  ‘No school?’ Walid’s beady eyes were bright, and his broad cheeks glowed over his pointed chin.

  ‘This is educational.’

  ‘Oliver’s the chaperone.’ That was Babette’s code for: I couldn’t shake off the little shit.

  The driver, Mohammed, was a friend of Walid’s. I watched his gold-ringed fingers on the wheel, the long nails on his pinkies curved over themselves like the whorls on a shell worn by the sea. He had a square, firm face and heavy eyeballs that moved like giant ball bearings under his immense brows. He fixed his hood ornament over the yellow double lines of the coastal highway, swerving to the right lane and leaning into the horn whenever a car approached, flashing its lights. He laughed each time I recoiled, which was a relief because he and Walid were quarrelling.

  ‘This was Phoenicia.’ Walid gestured towards banana plantations clumped on the flatlands. ‘Lebanese are not Arabs. We’re descendants of the Phoenicians. We gave the world purple.’

  Mohammed exhaled, hard. ‘Lebanese are always Arabs. You are Arab. I am Arab.’ He touched his heart.

  ‘Mohammed, it’s in the books. Your ancestors are Phoenician. That’s why Lebanon is so different to all those other Arab countries. It’s worldly, it’s vibrant, and everyone can live together – Jew, Christian, Shia and Sunni.’