Beirut put on its best dress and danced. Extravagant weddings were held in the hotels along the Corniche again. The makeup stayed in place. New concrete held the crumbling facades together, making them appear stable. The cameras of the Arab and Western media clicked their shutters and framed the action for their audiences. TV screens in Germany showed a country that was still limping a little but managing to get by without crutches. A country that was perhaps even ready to blossom again, to recover its former beauty. And after the election: lots of hand-shaking and jubilant winners.
But nobody removed the posters from the walls. Hafez al-Assad continued to smile down on Beirut.
“They’re thick as pig shit. Can’t even be subtle about screwing us over,” Hakim grumbled, throwing a peanut at our TV, which for days had been showing the same images of Beirut presented by different newsreaders. He saw my mother glare at him and gesture towards me. Hakim muttered an apology, leaned forward, picked up the peanut, and glumly put it in his mouth. His unkempt hair was standing on end as usual. And he still resembled a meerkat, even when he was getting worked up about politics.
“Some ballot boxes took nine hours to travel a ten-minute distance, and nobody thinks it’s strange? People who never even bothered voting have handed the country to the Syrians on a silver platter. All the Lebanese who packed up and fled the country should have been allowed to vote. We would’ve given those asses their marching orders!”
“Hakim,” Mother warned.
“Sorry.”
“It will work,” Father murmured. He was sitting on the right-hand side of the couch, where he always sat. My sister had fallen asleep on his lap.
“What Lebanon needs right now is a project,” Hakim said. “If these people aren’t given something to do, they’ll start to miss their guns. We need to become a financial centre again so that the sheikhs invest their money with us—in companies, international schools, universities, infrastructure, hotels—rather than keeping it in the Gulf States. Then we’ll be a country the world wants to visit again, a meeting place, a land of conferences and trade fairs …”
“It will work,” Father repeated. “It’s good that Hariri won.”
“He has money, his companies will rebuild the country, and everything will sparkle—the streets, the buildings, the squares. But then the other idiots who also got into parliament will come along and piss all over the beautiful buildings.”
“Hakim,” Mother snapped.
“Sorry,” he said again and turned to me. “Samir, do you want to hear a joke?”
I did.
“A Syrian goes into an electronics shop and asks the salesman, ‘Excuse me, have you got colour televisions?’ And the salesman replies, ‘Yes, we’ve a wide range of colour TVs.’ And the Syrian says, ‘Great! I’ll take a green one.’”
I laughed. Hakim had lots of jokes about Syrians. He liked to tell them again and again, and he was usually the one who laughed hardest. I’d heard this joke at least three times before, though Hakim would always vary the colour in the punchline. I never asked myself why the jokes were always at the Syrians’ expense. The Germans told East Frisian jokes, and the Lebanese told Syrian jokes. It seemed logical to me.
Father didn’t join in the laughter. I wasn’t even sure he’d heard the joke. He just kept staring at the TV, his eyebrows raised as if he were watching a storm approaching. He’d been behaving strangely over the past few days. I didn’t know why and wondered if I’d done something wrong. His mood swings were extreme; it was like waking up on an April morning, looking out the window and seeing sunshine one minute, downpours and lightning the next. And he often seemed completely absent, failing to respond when I spoke to him. Something wasn’t right. His behaviour unsettled me because I’d never seen this side of him before. Sure, he could be grumpy on occasion, and if I got up to mischief, he might get cross and tell me off, but such moods were fleeting shadows compared to his current state of mind. His behaviour now was uncharacteristic, both of the rogue who was always thinking of new ways to enjoy life and of the calm, measured father I’d seen in quiet moments. Mother, who had known him for much longer than me, was bewildered too, which unnerved me even more, as she had obviously never encountered this side of him either. He ignored her, barely replied to her questions, retreated into himself. It was as if the quiet, pensive part of him had mutated into something darker. The events in Lebanon that found their way onto our TV had put him under a spell, like black magic. All I could do was tell myself it was a passing phase, a reaction to the stress of moving, and so, like a dog that’s not sure if it’s done something wrong, I skulked around his legs every now and then, or quietly observed him from a corner. I just hoped his mood didn’t have anything to do with our new home; I was afraid we’d have to move again if he didn’t like our new flat. Being afraid of anything in relation to my father was new. Since my little sister had arrived, we were one big family living in a big flat. But now Father seemed sad.
I’d never seen him really sad before. Usually he was like a captain in whose wake everyone wanted to follow, someone who never had any difficulty striking up a conversation with strangers. He won people over with ease. The fact that he never once forgot a name certainly helped. If we were walking through town and he spotted someone on the other side of the street, even someone he’d met only briefly several weeks earlier, he would smile, raise his hand in greeting, and call the person’s name. How many times did we stop to chat to a Mr al-Qasimi, a Mrs Fedorov, the el-Tayeb or Schmid family, a Bilaal, an Ivana, or an Inge? I never once got the impression these people weren’t just as happy to stop and chat. Small talk was Father’s trump card, because he remembered not just people’s names, but also every other detail about them. He would casually ask, “How are the kids doing?” or “How is the treatment going? Is your back any better?” or “Did you sort out those squeaky brakes?” He would often offer to help: “If your shoulder is still bothering you, we’ll get your groceries for you—just give us a list and Samir will bring you back whatever you need.” Or: “How are you getting on with the house? Is your attic finished? If you need someone to help put in the insulation, give me a ring.” Everyone who spoke to Father soon felt as if they’d known him for years, as if they were friends, even. I was often struck by the warmth with which he greeted people. He’d never shake a stranger’s hand without resting his left hand on their shoulder for a moment. Or else he’d shake the person’s hand with both of his. A cordial gesture, as if they were closing a deal, and indeed I often felt that was how he saw it too: Welcome! You’re part of my world now.
Although he wasn’t particularly tall, to me he seemed like a lighthouse, someone who oriented you, someone you could see from a distance. I’m certain many others saw him that way too. At the market, he would greet the traders, skilfully ask how they were doing, and get such an easy conversation going that they barely noticed when he got down to business. He loved haggling. He was a true Arab in that regard. He was always trying his luck, and not just when he took me to the market. Even in the supermarket, in the aisle where the porridge oats and ready meals were, he might take a bemused shop assistant aside, and, with a conspiratorial expression on his face, whisper, “The cheese … can you do any better on the price?”
And he sang. He was a real Arab in that way too. He would sing on the street, unperturbed by the looks people gave him. “Germans don’t burst into song on the street,” he once said to me as we strolled back from the market hand-in-hand, laden with bags of fresh fruit and vegetables. It was a day made for singing, a day like a summer’s tune: sunshine, awnings, children with chocolate ice cream smeared around their mouths, couples holding hands, a dreadlocked boy in cut-off jeans rattling over the kerb on his skateboard.
“Why not?” I asked.
“Because they care too much what other people think. They’re worried people will think they’re crazy if they start singing on the street.”
&
nbsp; “Maybe you’re the one who’s crazy?”
“Maybe I am.” He winked at me, reached into a bag for an apple and took a bite out of it before handing it to me. “Or maybe deep down they’d like to sing in public too, but they don’t dare because they think you need a permit.”
He liked to joke about how you need a permit for everything in Germany. I overheard him laughing about it with Mother a few times, so I knew he wasn’t being serious.
And then he sang: “B-hibbak ya lubnan, ya watani b-hibbak, bi-shmalak bi-jnubak bi-sahlak b-hibbak …”
I love you, Lebanon, my country, I love you. Your north, your south, your plains, I love you.
I squeezed his hand tight. I knew the song. I knew the singer. I’d heard her voice many times before; steeped in sadness, longing, and poetry, it was a voice that gently eased over the melody and slipped into the foreground of almost every song. Fairuz, that was her name. I’d seen her on TV once, standing like a sphinx in front of the temple ruins of Baalbek as she sang this same song. In front of thousands of cheering people. A beautiful woman with striking, severe features, aloof, her hair as red as autumn leaves, a gold dress draped over her shoulders. In the spotlight, she looked slightly surreal, like a noblewoman’s portrait come to life, striding across the stage to the microphone. Mother loved her songs too. Everyone loved Fairuz. She was the harp of the Orient, the nightingale of the Middle East, singing about her love of her homeland. Someone—I think it was Hakim—once called her “the mother of all Lebanese people.”
This is how we walked home, with Father singing. I joined in at some point. We weren’t bothered by the funny looks we got. In fact, the more people crossed our path, the louder we sang, and we didn’t care if we barely hit a note. Holding hands, our shopping bags rustling in the wind, we sang in Arabic, because we wouldn’t have been able to express in German how we felt right then.
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4
Father was quick to realise how important it was to learn German. After fleeing burning Beirut in spring of 1983, the first refuge my parents found in Germany was the secondary school’s sports hall in our town. The school had been shut down the previous year when routine inspections during the summer holidays had revealed excessive levels of asbestos in the air. But there were no other options, so the sports hall ended up as a refugee reception centre. Father soon managed to get hold of books so that he could teach himself this foreign language. At night, while others around him slept wrapped in blankets on the floor, he clicked on a pocket torch and studied German. By day, he could sometimes be seen standing in a corner, eyes closed, repeating vocabulary to himself. He learned fast. Soon he was the one the aid workers sought out be their interpreter. Then he’d stand, a circle of others around him, and explain to the aid workers in broken German which medicine people needed or what it said on the certificates and documents they held out to him. My father was no intellectual. He’d never been to university. I don’t even know whether he was smarter than average. But he was a master of the art of survival and he knew that it would be to his advantage if he could make himself indispensable.
The atmosphere in the sports hall was often strained. People who had arrived here with no possessions, nothing but hope for a new life, were now condemned to wait for their fate to unfold. The air was stuffy, the space cramped. A constant hum of voices hovered beneath the ceiling; there was never complete silence. At night, you’d hear children crying or mothers weeping, and the snoring, scratching, and coughing of the refugees. If one got a cold, many were sick a few days later. The aid workers did their best, but there were shortages of everything: medicine, toiletries, food, not to mention toys for the kids, or ways for the grown-ups to keep themselves busy.
Losing their homeland was a fate everyone shared; they were all refugees. But a residence permit was also at stake, and not everyone would be allowed to stay; they knew this too. Everyone had witnessed scenes in which screaming mothers clung to the poles holding up the basket-ball hoops as they resisted being carried out of the hall along with their children. Here, one person could be the reason why another didn’t get to stay. That made fighting a serious problem. But settling fights was another thing Father was good at. He’d talk calmly and persuasively to the irate parties, stressing how important it was not to cause trouble, how it helped to make a good impression, because news of what went on in the hall would inevitably find its way to the outside world. Sometimes there were indeed people outside the hall, holding placards that said there wasn’t enough room in this town for so many people.
There were others too, people who brought bags of clothes—even if they were in the minority. And many of the refugees began to see my father as an authority, someone they could go to with their worries. “We’re people too,” they’d complain, “not animals, and yet we’re locked up in here.” Or, “In Jounieh, I was a lawyer. I had a practice that got destroyed. Where am I meant to go if I they won’t let me stay here? Go back? There is no going back. I have no house, no family …” And Father agreed with them, though never absolutely. He always stressed how important it was to understand the people outside the hall, that they were probably afraid, the way lots of people fear the unknown. The more crowded the hall became, the trickier the situation became. People would suddenly overreact, but it wasn’t only due to stress and uncertainty. Religious differences could also trigger insults and fist-fights. Many of the Lebanese refugees divided their camps up along religious lines. And so our sports hall mirrored the streets of divided Beirut: Muslims on the left, Maronite Christians on the right. Each blamed the other for their misfortune—for having lost everything, for being refugees, for having to live in a sports hall.
My father’s friendship with Hakim was another thing that lent him authority. Hakim and Yasmin, who was barely two at the time, were Muslims. My parents were Christians. They had all fled Beirut together. Hakim and Yasmin were camped right beside my parents—in the Christian sector of the hall, so to speak. But Hakim encouraged his daughter to play with all of the kids, making no distinctions. My father and Hakim would say to the others, “We’re not in Lebanon anymore. We all came here because we want peace, not war. It’s not about Christians and Muslims here. It’s about us. As Lebanese people.”
But sometimes words were in vain. One night, Father was woken by a dull thumping, the sound of something hard rhythmically pounding something soft. Fumbling in the dark and aware of my mother breathing gently beside him, he sat up. All he could hear in the dark hall was that noise. He made his way towards its source, putting one foot carefully in front of the other to avoid stepping on sleeping bodies. In the dim shadows he could make out one figure bent over another. But he was too late. Father could see the battered face even as he leaned in to grab the shoulder of the man who was straddling his victim and punching him like a man possessed. The woman closest to them began to scream. Someone turned the lights on and people sat up suddenly, looking around in shock. More and more people started screaming. There was blood not just on the floor, but all over the hands and clothes of the man who had killed the other. Four men grabbed him and pinned him to the ground until the police arrived.
For a while, the dead man’s place in the hall remained empty, and his death seemed to put an end to the fighting too. But more people were arriving in the sports hall every day, so it wasn’t long before someone spread his blanket in the free space to lie down and sleep. After a few days, it was impossible to say where exactly the empty space had been.
Meanwhile, Father’s German improved by the day. For him, the ability to master this language was inextricably linked with the fate that awaited him and his wife. Because he knew how important it was, he tried to teach Hakim what he learned too. In the evenings, he used to tell stories in the hall. In the beginning, he sat on the floor surrounded by children, their eyes wide, their mouths agape. He told them about a giant spaceship that brought everyone to the bountiful planet Amal. Different coloured lin
es on the floor of the spaceship led the way to the magnificent bathrooms or the splendid dining hall or the cockpit. In his head, Father had converted the sports hall into this spaceship. The dingy showers in the changing rooms became a hi-tech spa in which little robots scrubbed people’s backs. The side-lines of the basketball court became energy-acceleration tracks, perfect for a kids’ game in which all they had to do was take a running jump onto this line in order to whizz all around the spaceship at great speed. Its captain was a crazy camel who entertained the passengers with comical announcements. Father put on a funny voice for this purpose, making the children crack up. In Arabic, amal means hope. Soon everyone in the sports hall was familiar with the planet called Hope. Sometimes when even the grown-ups could no longer hide tears of despair and exhaustion from their children, the little ones could be seen stroking their cheeks, saying “It’s not far to Amal now.”
It wasn’t long before parents began to join the circle around Father, and a few days later, some of the aid workers were also listening in. Soon this story time became a regular fixture, an evening ritual that brought people together. It was the only time when no one spoke but Father. His reassuring voice floated above the listeners’ heads and filled them with a wealth of imagery.
These days, having learned so much more about him, I often wonder how he managed to keep his secret. And I always come to the same conclusion: his ability to escape reality must have helped him.
Hakim’s asylum application was approved before my parents’.
As a single father, with passable German to boot, he and Yasmin could expect to get a permanent residence permit in the near future. My parents hugged and kissed them goodbye and waved them off when they left the sports hall. Their next stop was a little social housing flat on the edge of town. A few months later, Hakim also got a work permit and found a job in a joinery. He had played the lute all his life and had no trouble convincing the master joiner, who had a soft spot for refugees, that the calluses on his fingers were from years and years of working with tools. He enjoyed the work too. Being a lute-maker’s son, he loved the smell of wood. Hakim had spent many childhood years in his father’s workshop before heading to Beirut to become a successful musician.
The Storyteller Page 3