The prayer blessing worked on the Israelis, with a little help from your mother acting like a Halloween ghost on meth. Not a scrape, not a blemish on the house.
A week after your mother shook the sheets, a young Israeli soldier knocked on the large mahogany door. Your parents saw a shy, scrawny, mild-mannered boy. He looked fourteen at best, your mother told you, his glasses too big for his face. She wanted to drag him to your room, order him to get out of that idiotic uniform, grab a bath, pick something normal to wear from your closet, and then she would feed him. The soldier, speaking fluid Levantine Arabic, apologized profusely for disturbing them, so much so that your parents began to feel guilty for appearing intimidating to the poor boy. He had heard the birds, he told them, all the way down the street. He followed the sounds to the house, just as Melquíades, the gypsy in One Hundred Years of Solitude, found his way to Macondo by following the song of the birds. Beautiful singing—some trills the boy knew, but some he could not identify. He was going to study ornithology, you see. He was obsessed with birds, like his own father was. He hadn’t been sure where the birdsong was coming from until that day, when he finally had a break. He was not supposed to wander on his own, he said, but the siren song called to him. He begged for permission to see the birds, if only for a moment. Of course your parents let him in. Your father may have despised the Israelis, but a young man who loved birds couldn’t be a terrible person.
The young man was stunned when he saw the glassed-in room. Sunlight inside the house, the outdoors indoors, and birds, a profusion of birds. He had a look of such longing that your father forgave his trespasses, almost his country’s as well, but not quite. The coffee came out, the entire hospitality accoutrements—almonds, candies, chocolate—even in the middle of a war, one must be prepared for guests. When your mother complimented the soldier on his Arabic, he explained that his mother was Druze and his father Jewish. He spoke Arabic with his mother’s family and Hebrew with his father’s. He had problems, he said, answering your mother’s questions. He was Jewish, but not technically since his mother wasn’t, and he wasn’t Druze, because his father wasn’t. He felt homeless, he said, which of course elicited hostly homilies from your parents: their home was his home; he would always be welcome, the usual stuff. He asked if he could visit again when the Israeli army withdrew. “On the way back” was how he phrased it. Surely, this invasion would not last long. Of course, your parents assured him, if they were still around, if he remembered, then his visit would be most welcome.
You didn’t know whether he remembered, but luckily your family was no longer around.
The Israelis went insane, bombing Beirut incessantly. Even though the house wasn’t in danger, your family decided to pack as much as they could and left for the safety of Damascus. Your parents left as soon as the Americans got involved.
The Israelis forced the Lebanese parliament to elect the head of the Phalange as president, and he was assassinated soon after. The Israeli army surrounded the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps, and the Phalangists massacred thousands of women and children as Ariel Sharon smoked his hookah and cheered from the sidelines. Oh, the hand-wringing at the UN.
Israel decided it would occupy only the south of Lebanon. The civil war flared up again. The American marines got involved in the war. Unfortunately for your family, Americans don’t understand paper prayers. Druze juju would not translate to English. Blessings were not America’s forte.
One morning, for reasons no one could fathom, the battleship New Jersey, cruising in the Mediterranean a tad off the Lebanese shore, fired its sixteen-inch shells into various villages in the mountains, killing who knows how many. One of those shells fell through the roof of your father’s dream house, incinerating everything. The structure remained standing for the most part, roofless but standing. Nothing inside was unharmed. The birds—the birds were roasted alive.
After its murderous foray into Lebanese politics, the New Jersey was retired, the last of its kind. The shell that destroyed your home might have been the last sixteen-incher to be fired. Don’t you feel special?
The Americans? A man drove a truck full of explosives into the US barracks just outside of Beirut, killing 241 young marines. Reagan withdrew all his forces, washing his hands of irrational Lebanon, calling the Lebanese terrorists, terrorists, terrorists that kill innocent peacekeepers. Why couldn’t they fight fairly, like decent people, using battleships, fighter jets, shock and awe?
Your mother would phone you in your small apartment in San Francisco. Your father was devastated, she told you. He didn’t know what to do anymore. The house was more than his pride and joy, she explained. The house was him, and he was the house. The battleship destroyed him. He had no idea who he was anymore. He tried to be stoic; he was a man’s man after all. He’d tell her that they would build another house, maybe buy an apartment in Beirut or start anew and move to Paris. But she had caught him surreptitiously weeping on more than one occasion, whenever he thought no one was watching. She wished you were there to comfort him, but what could you do?
What could you do? You were in graduate school. You had to get another degree in order to become a productive member of an evil society. You gobbled up hamburgers and quenched your thirst with Coke. You dove into gay sex clubs every night. You were assimilating, for crying out loud. You did not wish to remain an outsider in your adopted country. How could you explain to your father that you were not coming back, that you were choosing to become a citizen of the country that destroyed his dream with a single sixteen-inch shell? Which side were you on?
You would try to become an American, become one with people who would rather see your family dead.
Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists.
Rapefugees Not Welcome
Late afternoon found the four of us back at the cookie dispensary in Moria watching another impromptu soccer game between pup tents, the brightness of the boys’ smiles a contrast to the lacy gray air with its veiled light. The cookie shack overlooked the tier below, where the game was, which was one tier above another level of tents, which in turn was above the lowest rung, where the riot police still picnicked not too far from the public bathroom that they did not use.
Emma seemed more agitated than usual, as if she’d woken up from a fearful dream. Mazen and Rasheed watched the young men kick the ball around, the latter more wistfully.
“I can’t help feeling that waiting here is a mistake,” Emma said between sips of dark tea. The lipstick on the Styrofoam cup was a shade lighter than the same on her lips.
Mazen nodded his head a few times in agreement, his top-heavy hair wobbling like a silver crown. He kept track of the smorgasbord of peopled scenes around him, his eyes darting here and there with a modicum of discretion: the soccer boys, the pup-tent refugees, the young volunteers in neon, the riot police in brutal gear, the cookie pushers, and our conversation.
A moist, limp breeze wiped my face like a towelette. One of the players kicked the ball too hard and it soared. We all leaned right, following its flight, four heads nodding in unison as the ball bounced down the hill.
“I’m hearing rumblings,” Emma said. “Unpleasant ones. Something happened on New Year’s Eve in Cologne. There are no official reports yet, but the talk online is that refugees sexually assaulted dozens of women. It’s not good.”
For some reason, whether the changing light or my darkening mood, I couldn’t take my eyes off the fetid pool next to the public bathroom, whose chocolate-colored surface seemed to be turning opalescent. A young girl poked at something in the pool with a stick, over and over.
“I’ve heard the same,” Rasheed said. “And it might be more than dozens. Early rumors are that migrants harassed hundreds of women in the subways. It’s being said that it was an organized attack.”
“Organized how?” Mazen asked.
“Not sure,” Rasheed said. “It seems that a few dark-skinn
ed men, as they’re calling them, attacked women during the New Year’s celebration. They’re saying over one thousand young men arrived at the revelries around Cologne Cathedral in large groups and began to attack German women.”
“That doesn’t seem right,” Mazen said.
Torn pieces of Styrofoam, breadcrumbs, and small bones were scattered on the ground next to a boastful dandelion. No other greenery could survive, the earth scarred by cigarettes quickly extinguished.
“It doesn’t matter whether it is or not,” Emma said. “Even one incident is terrible, and not just for the victim. Some will use any crime by a migrant to try and close the borders. Everyone will be in an uproar. Nazis go insane if one migrant so much as looks at a German woman. Can you imagine what will happen when this thing becomes public, organized sexual assaults by groups of migrants? My lord.”
“I don’t see how migrants could organize,” Mazen said.
“It doesn’t matter whether they can or not,” Emma said. “It’s a catastrophe.”
A hesitation in the free-for-all of a soccer game. A young man stood over the ball. No one attempted to tackle him. An instant. All the players glanced toward the incline behind the makeshift midget field before the game resumed. Two Greek policemen marched up the cement walkway. Unlike their friends below, they wore no helmets, carried no riot shields, no visible polycarbonates of any kind, but they did have their side guns and batons, as well as their bulletproof vests. They felt less threatening and probably felt less threatened. They walked slowly in sync.
“I love men in uniform,” Rasheed said. “Sorry. Couldn’t help myself.”
Three volunteers, young men, followed the policemen up the hill. American sounding, they chatted loudly, like noisy sparrows trying to outshout each other, paying little heed to anything but each other and their cell phones. They sauntered with slow shuffling steps as if on a promenade in their own sacred garden of Hera. One of them looked up, noticed me watching, and smiled generously, as if I’d caught him in the midst of a ritual I couldn’t possibly fathom.
“I’m leaving,” Emma said. “Taking the night off. Make myself a hot bath and disappear in it.”
New Year’s Eve, Cologne
What happened that night in Cologne? The information was slow to emerge. We didn’t hear much during the week we were on Lesbos. When the news finally erupted, it spooked me.
On New Year’s Day, the police press release described the previous evening’s events as peaceful. Not much out of the ordinary had happened, they said. The usual large crowds celebrated outside the historic cathedral and around the train station—revelry, merriment, alcohol, and fireworks. But what the police and the newspapers related later was an entirely different story. On New Year’s Eve some fifteen hundred men, described by the authorities as having “a North African or Arabic” appearance, most of them sloshed drunk, descended upon the celebratory scene. At some point they broke into gangs and formed rings around young women, refusing to let them go. Some of the men groped victims while others stole handbags, wallets, and cell phones. The women screamed, fought back, tried to escape, but many found it almost impossible to free themselves. Witnesses described the atmosphere around the train station as aggressive, ominously violent, and intimidating. Fireworks were thrown into the crowds to increase the tension. Several women were raped.
Were these attacks organized beforehand? Who were these men? Why did it take so long for the reports to filter out?
Among the early arrests, thirty-one suspects were identified by name, including eighteen asylum seekers. The thirty-one were nine Algerians, eight Moroccans, four Syrians, five Iranians, two Germans, an Iraqi, a Serb, and an American. I tried to find the American’s name or which city he was from but wasn’t able to.
There was one report that was more heartening: a group of Syrian men surrounded an American woman, protected her from assailants by forming a ring around her, and then led her back to her friends.
Of course, in response to the assaults a large number of asylum seekers and darker-skinned refugees were attacked all over Europe. Xenophobia spiked. The repercussions of the Night of the Long Fingers, as it was called, were seen everywhere.
A monosynaptic response, the knee was hit in Cologne, and legs kicked out in Warsaw, in Budapest, in Paris, everywhere.
Antirefugee political parties grew in power.
Syrian refugees went into limbo.
The Cave of Shanidar
In spite of quite a bit of evidence to the contrary, I like to think of the world as kind, of humanity as decent if flawed, my misinterpretation of the just-world fallacy. I like to think that we humans try to do the right thing.
Between 1957 and 1961, at a burial site inside a cave called Shanidar in northern Iraq, archaeologists discovered the fossilized remains of eight adult and two infant Neanderthals, dating from around sixty-five thousand to thirty-five thousand years ago. Found with them were hundreds of stone tools, as well as bones of wild goats and tortoises. Nine of the ten remains were lost, along with fifteen thousand cultural artifacts, during that mess of shock and awe in 2003, when US forces invaded the country, destroyed the infrastructure, and chose to protect the oil ministry building but not the National Museum of Iraq.
The most famous of the ten Neanderthals was the one who was discovered first, called Shanidar 1 but known as Nandy among his excavators. He was remarkably old for a Neanderthal, somewhere between forty and fifty, yet he displayed severe trauma-related deformities. He had a withered right arm, no hand or forearm, and a deformed right leg. He was also apparently deaf, as his ear canals were blocked by exostoses. His day-to-day life must have been excruciatingly painful, yet he was seemingly cared for by the community.
Among the numerous discoveries at the burial site were clumps of pollen representing a large variety of flowers, from grape hyacinth to yarrow. A debate still rages among archaeologists about whether these flowers were part of Neanderthal burial rites or were introduced to the site by jirds, a variety of rodent.
I prefer to think that my ancestors and yours would care for the weakest among them and then bury him with garlands of flowers. Go, dear one, we send you away with yellow cockspur and daisies, cornflowers and hyacinths.
Shanidar 3 does not have a nickname that I know of. He is in the United States at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. An immigrant! He, too, was between forty and fifty years old and was found in the same grave as Nandy. He had a wound to the left ninth rib, a severe cut deep enough to have collapsed his lung. Shanidar 3 is the oldest known individual who was presumably murdered.
My ancestors and yours were also killers.
Malawi, Mon Amour
One of my favorite people in the world is a cousin of Francine’s or, to be more precise, as precise as one can be within the limits of the English language, her first cousin once removed. Pete Jones had a generic name, a unique story, and a disarming smile. I’d known him for a long time, since he was in junior high. Francine was close to her cousin Esther, his mother. They grew up together. Pete was a bright, ambitious boy: in the top five percent of his class, quarterback on his high school team, dated a cheerleader, had all the accompanying perks accorded to special young men in the United States. More important to his family was that he aced his SATs and was accepted by many of the schools he applied to. He chose Northwestern because he was a Midwest boy, but he never attended. Changed his mind.
He shocked everybody by enlisting in the army.
His decision was surprising, although it shouldn’t have been. He was quite articulate about why he wanted to join the army and fight. It was the summer of 2002, at the height of jingoism after the World Trade Center attack. He felt that the terrorists had hurt his country and he wanted his country to hurt them right back. Bush would soon declare his intention to bomb Iraq back to the Middle Ages, and our Pete felt that it was his personal mission to humiliate al Qaeda, the
Taliban, Saddam, and all those people over there.
His mother vehemently disapproved of his decision. Esther and her son argued for weeks. Some of their yelling matches became legendary in their family. The phrase “What has Saddam ever done to you?” turned into a family catchall for situations that were completely crazy or nonsensical. Two Thanksgivings ago, Esther complained that her grandchildren were running around her dining table yelling: “What has Saddam ever done to you?”
Pete was shipped to Afghanistan not long after, then Iraq. He hardly spoke to his mother for three years. Their relationship remained strained until he returned home in 2006 broken and one leg short.
He told Francine that his youth was taken away from him in one ruthless swoop, in one cruel explosion. He was not yet twenty-two, on a desert road in Iraq with his troop. The vehicle had some malfunction. While they waited for it to be fixed, his superior denied him some minor request. Pete turned around, sulking and walking away, whining to himself, and kicked at a stone. He couldn’t remember much else other than waking up in suffocating heat in a makeshift hospital bed in a bright room with high windows and without his right leg below the knee.
He returned home an amputee, downtrodden and inconsolable. He immured himself within high walls of despair. His mother couldn’t get through to him. He wouldn’t speak to friends, wouldn’t leave his room, which Esther had kept intact waiting for his return. The VA therapist was not able to help and neither was Francine. I remember walking into the house one day after his return and experiencing an immense weight as soon as I crossed the threshold. Pete’s phantom leg would get cramps, which his brain thought of as real, and the house brimmed with a phantom gloom, which we all recognized as real.
The Wrong End of the Telescope Page 19