H01 - The Gingerbread House

by Carin Gerhardsen

  “Well spoken. Let’s go for it.”

  They toasted and drank and she felt how the alcohol was already making her feel relaxed and a little tipsy. When she thought about it, she had not had time for a real lunch, yet she did not feel particularly hungry. Maybe that was due to the tension in the slow-moving investigation, now in combination with the filling beer.

  They discussed Christer Fuglesang’s impending journey into outer space and laughed at Swedish television’s ongoing parodies of the poor astronaut who never seemed to take off. They ordered another round and Petra gulped down the last of the peanuts and pushed the empty bowl aside.

  “So where’s the wife this evening?” she asked.

  “She’s with the mother-in-law,” Jamal answered, looking down at his glass.

  “Yours or hers?”

  “Mine, of course.”

  “Isn’t she comfortable with your big fat Lebanese family?”

  “Sure, but--”

  “And you weren’t invited to your mother-in-law’s?” Petra interrupted. “Poor you.”

  With feigned sympathy she caressed him lightly on the cheek with the back of her hand, but he recoiled with an irritated frown, so she pulled back her hand.

  “What’s going on with you?” she asked with surprise.

  His reflex movement embarrassed her. To take charge of her rejected hand again she reached for the glass and took a few substantial gulps.

  “Stop flirting or whatever it is you’re up to,” said Jamal morosely.

  She shifted her gaze over his shoulder and for the second time her eyes met the blond man’s. He raised his wine glass toward her. He looked friendly, with an open appearance reminiscent of Conny Sjöberg’s. This observation made her respond to his toast, contrary to her usual instincts. Jamal noticed something going on over his head, so he took a quick glance over his shoulder to see who she was toasting. When he looked at her again she had set the glass aside again and looked him right in the eyes.

  “Flirting—what do you mean by that? It felt like an insult.”

  “Making toasts with strange men, for example,” said Jamal quietly. “Don’t do that. You seem a little tipsy.”

  “Jamal, for one thing, he was the one who toasted me. Secondly, I’ve had one beer. Thirdly, you said that I was flirting before I... before he toasted me.”

  “You’ve had almost two beers. And you haven’t eaten a thing. You’re working hard, exercising hard, and you’ve had peanuts for dinner. You should expect that to have an effect.”

  “You still haven’t explained to me this thing about flirting. I think I can touch you without you thinking I’m trying to get you in bed. We’ve known each other a hundred years, for Christ’s sake. Touched each other for just as long.”

  Jamal motioned with his hand to calm her, but this only stirred up more emotions.

  “So why did you want to go out with me?” she continued, in a lower voice now. “I wasn’t in the mood, but you were. So you got me to go and here we sit talking and having a nice time and suddenly you get all dark for no reason. Of course I’m hurt, don’t you get that?”

  Jamal turned his eyes away from her and let them rest for a moment on a vague spot above a security guard who was leaning against the wall behind the bar. Then he turned toward her once again and took her hand in his. He looked at her a while with a dejected look in his eyes before he started talking again.

  “Okay, Petra. I take back what I said about flirting. I apologize for that.”

  “Seriously?”

  She was not sure where this was going, if it would be better or worse, but she did not want to be considered a flirt. Especially not by Jamal, who with his brown velvet eyes, the charming little dimple on his chin, and his well-built thirty-year-old policeman’s body could have knocked any woman off her feet before he got married.

  “Seriously. But you are a little tipsy,” he said, revealing his perfect white teeth in a smile as he let go of her hand. “That’s okay. I guess that’s why we’re here. You’re just right, so don’t think any more about that either.”

  Jamal sighed and Petra waited attentively for what would come next.

  “Now you might think I’m a little sensitive,” he continued. “But sometimes I get so damn tired of all the allusions to my origins. I know the intentions aren’t bad, and I know that in most cases there’s no prejudice behind it. But it’s just so damn tedious. I am who I am, regardless of my Lebanese roots, which I’m proud of by the way. Sometimes I get the idea that you all don’t see me behind all that Arab stuff you imagine you see in me. I’m Swedish, damn it! Just like you. I’ve been living in Sweden since I was six years old, for twenty-four years.”

  Petra looked at him with a kind of uncomprehending sympathy in her eyes.

  “And I don’t like that look either,” Jamal pointed out. “Don’t feel sorry for me. I don’t spend my time feeling sorry for you.”

  Petra straightened up from her slump and tried not to look too sanctimonious. Instead she gulped down the last of her glass and, without asking Jamal, ordered two more beers. Jamal too emptied his glass.

  “And where do I fit into the picture?” she asked. “What was it I said that made you...grumpy?”

  “It goes on all the time. You don’t notice it, because your intentions are good and you know that I know that you like me and respect me. But it’s “Ramadan” this and “Mohammed” that, one thing after another. Just little things, but it all adds up... What was it you said before...? Something about my ‘big fat Lebanese family’? I just get so tired of that.”

  Suddenly Petra knew what he meant. She recalled that she had jokingly asked him whether it “offended his Arabic manhood” that he sat while she stood. She realized how annoying it must be to get such comments about everything you said and did.

  “It’s as though in every conversation with me you had to insert a little comment about...my big ears or something,” said Petra, suddenly feeling that she was blushing.

  Jamal’s face broke out in a scornful smile. Petra covered her face with her hands and drew up her shoulders.

  “I shouldn’t have said anything!” she peeped behind her hands.

  “Now you’re flirting, Westman,” said Jamal triumphantly.

  “I am not, I really am embarrassed.”

  Petra looked up at him imploringly.

  “I should have made something up, not revealed my sore spot.”

  Jamal took her head between his hands and pulled her hair behind her ears with his blunt fingers. Then he said with a suddenly serious expression, “I think you have nice ears. Do we understand each other?”

  Petra nodded.

  “Then I think we should leave this topic of conversation.”

  Petra agreed and suddenly felt stone sober. It was often that way for her. After one beer, when she hadn’t had any for a long time, things could really start spinning. After two she felt sober again.

  They sat and talked a while longer. Petra asked what plans Jamal had for the weekend, but he answered evasively and looked at his watch. He asked her the same thing, but because as usual she hadn’t planned anything, there was not much to say about that. She ventured to ask what he thought about the war that was once again raging in Lebanon. Jamal sighed and Petra anticipated him.

  “I’m asking because I’m interested, not because I want to stir up anything.”

  “Yeah, yeah, it’s cool. It’s just that that’s something you can talk about endlessly. Of course I’m against the war. Lebanon was flourishing when the war broke out.

  “Have you been there?”

  “A few times. We were there on our honeymoon. It’s an amazing country. Was an amazing country.”

  “But the war will end sooner or later?” Petra asked.

  “I’m not so sure of that. It’s all very complicated. And very simple, seen from any particular perspective. Everyone wants what they think they have a right to. Everyone is right in their own way.”

  “But who s
hould you support? Who do you support?”

  “This is not a soccer match, with two teams. You don’t even know what teams are playing, do you?”

  “Apparently not,” Petra admitted.

  “There are more than two teams. The situation in Lebanon is even more complicated than the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Just as impossible to resolve, but harder to get a sense of. Most people in Lebanon don’t even know what it’s about.”

  “But tell me which side you’re on,” Petra tried ingenuously.

  “I’m sitting here in Sweden, simply hoping for peace. A peaceful solution where everyone gets their share of the pie. But that’s easy to say when you’re not in the middle of it. If I was still living in Lebanon, it would be a lot harder to view the conflict from any perspective other than my own.”

  “So where in Lebanon did you live?”

  “In a village in south Lebanon. Then in Beirut. Dad was a schoolteacher.”

  “And now? What does he do here in Sweden?”

  “He drove a taxi until he retired a year ago. When he came here he was very determined that we would all become Swedes, and that we would not isolate ourselves in some suburb among a lot of other immigrants. That’s both good and bad of course, but it turned out well for me and my siblings, so we’re extremely grateful to our parents. But they have never really managed to be accepted in Swedish society. They live for us.”

  “Is your dad satisfied with your choice of occupation?” Petra continued stubbornly.

  “He’s very proud of all four of us.”

  “What would you have become if you’d stayed in Lebanon, do you think?”

  Jamal emptied his glass and glanced at his watch. It was eight-thirty.

  “I’ve got to go now,” he said, jumping down from the barstool.

  He reached for his leather jacket and put it on without zipping it up. Petra had just started on her third beer, so she decided to stay a while and enjoy the lively Friday atmosphere around her. Jamal took his wallet from his back pocket and pulled out two hundred-kronor bills, which he placed on the bar in front of her.

  “See you,” he said, giving her a quick kiss on the cheek.

  “You didn’t answer my question,” said Petra.

  He looked at her for a few moments, a look that did not reveal what was going on inside his mind.

  “Hezbollah,” he answered curtly, and then left.

  Petra remained sitting a long time with her hands around the beer glass, staring vacantly ahead of her. What could that mean? Hezbollah—wasn’t that a terrorist group?

  “It looks like you may need a little refresher on the political situation in Lebanon.”

  Petra looked up with surprise. It was the man on the bar stool, the man who had toasted her earlier in the evening who was addressing her. He was nicely but casually dressed in a light-blue shirt unbuttoned at the neck, a dark-blue blazer, and a pair of nice-fitting jeans held in place by a Johan Lindeberg belt. When he smiled the skin around his eyes wrinkled in an attractive way, under a youthful head of hair that tended to fall down over his forehead.

  “Yes, that’s putting it mildly,” Petra sighed, responding to his smile with a little laugh.

  “Please excuse me, I didn’t mean to eavesdrop, but I happened to hear fragments of your conversation and I am a bit informed about the subject, so I couldn’t help myself. Would you like to talk, or perhaps you’d rather sit by yourself?”

  The man gave a genuinely pleasant impression, and the fact that he actually admitted eavesdropping somehow gave him added credibility. He had blue eyes and a thick mop of hair that she assumed would make any man his age a little jealous.

  “No, we can talk a little,” said Petra. “But I’m heading home soon,” she added to be on the safe side.

  “Yes, me too,” said the man. “I’m working tomorrow, so it will have to be an early evening for me.”

  He made no effort to move closer, but continued instead.

  “Lebanon is a marvelous country. Did you know that you can swim in the Mediterranean and go skiing on an amazing lift system all in one afternoon?”

  “I think I’ve heard that, but I didn’t know it was that close,” Petra admitted.

  “Yes, in Faraya-Mzaar there are something like forty slopes and the view from there is amazing. On one side you have the Bekaa Valley, and if the weather is clear, you can see all the way to Beirut.”

  “So that’s the place to go, if you can’t decide between a skiing or swimming vacation,” Petra laughed.

  “Absolutely. But not now. Cheers.”

  Petra responded to his toast with a nod and took a sip of her beer.

  “So, do you know anything about the war?” said Petra.

  He nodded and set his glass down in front of him.

  “Then you’ll have to brief me. It seems like I have a gap in my education right there.”

  “Sure. In the beginning of time—which was not all that long ago...”

  Petra suddenly realized that they were sitting there shouting at each other at a distance of several yards, and asked him to move closer. The man laughed at the ridiculous situation, took his wine glass and jacket and moved over to the stool where Jamal had just been sitting.

  “Peder,” he said, extending his hand. “Peder Fryhk.”

  “Petra,” said Petra.

  “Well, both of those trouble spots—Israel and Lebanon—were pet projects for a few European fools in the 1920s who got the idea they should stake a claim to areas with major archeological value. After the division of the Ottoman Empire, Syria became a French League of Nations mandate.”

  “After World War I?” said Petra.

  “After the World War I. The French colonialists took particular care of the Maronites—who were Catholics—in the Lebanon Mountains, the old Phoenician coastland in Syria. Then in the early 1920s, the French drew a few lines on the map and just like that, Lebanon became a Christian, European country in the midst of all the Muslims. Then, when Lebanon became independent in 1943, political power was divided between Christians and Muslims, and a few others. That was a balancing act, but it worked until the Arabs decided to invade the new state of Israel.”

  “When was that? 1947? ’48?”

  “It was 1948. Then Palestinian refugees poured into Lebanon, while hundreds of thousands of Christians fled and made their way to South America. Since then there has been no Christian majority in Lebanon, in fact, quite the contrary.”

  “And so the French and Israelis back the Christian minority and the Arab world supports the Muslims?”

  “Something like that. Although it’s even more complicated than that. You probably can’t bear listening to any more of my droning.”

  He emptied his wine glass and waved to the bartender.

  “Try me,” said Petra.

  “Okay. Two glasses of house red, thanks,” he said to the bartender and then continued his account for Petra, who was doing her best to memorize what he was saying.

  Once again she saw features of Sjöberg in this character. He had really warmed to this subject, and he was so eager that sparks were flying around him. And the enthusiasm was contagious.

  “None of these Palestinian refugees have any rights as citizens in Lebanon, so right there a certain discontent started to grow. Israel, for its part, feared the Arabs who surrounded them in all directions, so they made pacts with any non-Arabs who could be mobilized in the vicinity, including these Maronites in Lebanon. At that time, Egypt’s President Nasser was promoting Arab nationalism and in the late 1960s he forced the government of Lebanon, which had no say in it, to open up the southern part of the country to the PLO for attacks against Israel. South Lebanon became a Palestinian enclave. That was when the spiral of violence took off, you might say. And then there was Syria itself, which had never acknowledged the invention of the French Lebanon, as a separate country. So in 1975, when the civil war got going, Syria first helped the Palestinians kill Christians, and then the Maronites to murder P
alestinians. Finally they got what they wanted. With Israel’s consent, Syria occupied Lebanon under the assumption that they would keep the PLO in check in South Lebanon. Do you follow?”

  “So everyone was dissatisfied and everyone had pretty good reason to be that way too,” said Petra, emptying her beer glass.

  Peder Fryhk scooted a wine glass over to her.

  “That’s just how it was. And it only got worse. Did he say he came from South Lebanon, your friend?”

  “Yes, but that they moved to Beirut,” Petra confirmed.

  “The powers-that-be in Israel got the idea that they should eradicate the Palestinian enclave in South Lebanon, so they invaded, drove the Syrians out of Beirut, and installed a Christian regime in Lebanon. Syria then had the new Christian President assassinated, and the Maronites in turn started slaughtering civilian Palestinians in refugee camps. The PLO moved its headquarters to Tunis, but as you might guess, the foot soldiers remained in South Lebanon and naturally had major support from all the “old” Palestinians in the country, who had been living under a kind of apartheid since 1948. It was now, in the absence of the PLO, that Hezbollah was formed.”

  “And that wasn’t so strange,” Petra interjected.

  “No, not at all. And now there was a drawn-out war between Hezbollah and Israel playing out in South Lebanon.”

  “But the Lebanese in South Lebanon, what did they do?”

  “They were peaceful Shia Muslim farmers, who tried to keep out of it. Many of them now fled to south Beirut, which developed into a Hezbollah enclave where their sons were trained to be full-fledged child soldiers with great willingness to sacrifice.”

  “Because they had lost what they had and could see no future. Yes, good Lord,” Petra sighed. “It’s never-ending. When was this?”

  “Hezbollah was formed in 1982,” said Peder. “Cheers.”

  Petra sipped the wine and suddenly it was clear to her why Jamal’s father took his family and left Lebanon. And what Jamal meant by what he said as he was leaving the bar, and why he was unable to explain. And what an uneducated idiot she was. Twice she had been through a course in world history, first at the elementary level and then in high school. Neither time did they get further than the World War 1. She knew more than she cared to about the Stone Age and the Viking Age and the list of Sweden’s monarchs, but they had never even touched on the conflicts in the Middle East. The same with the other trouble spots in the modern world.