The Storyteller

by Pierre Jarawan

  My parents had to stay on in the hall for another while. When they eventually got the preliminary approval letter, many tears were shed. Mother cried tears of relief. Some of the grown-ups cried because they couldn’t imagine the sports hall without my father. And the children cried because their storyteller was leaving. It was a Tuesday when the man arrived and started looking around the hall. An aid worker who had been leaning against a door pointed him in the right direction, and he made a bee line for my parents.

  “Are you Brahim?”

  “Yes,” said Father.

  “Brahim el-Hourani?”

  “Yes, that’s right.”

  “And you are Rana el-Hourani?” he asked my mother.

  “Yes,” she confirmed.

  “A letter for you.” And when he noticed how Mother shrank back a little, the man smiled and said, “Congratulations!”

  And so Brahim the storyteller left the sports hall. Nearly everyone wanted to say goodbye. People came to wish my parents good luck, reassuring each other that they’d soon meet again, in town, as ordinary citizens, at the cinema, shops, or restaurants.

  Brahim. That was my father’s name. Brahim el-Hourani. Rana was my mother’s first name. The el-Houranis—those were my parents. I didn’t exist yet.

  My parents got a flat in the same housing scheme as Hakim and Yasmin. Fate and a few case workers had been kind to them. They ended up living only a few hundred metres apart. And Father, whose German was pretty good by then, also got a work permit within a few months. Mother once told me how he went off to the Foreigners’ Registration Office with a bag of freshly baked baklava and put it on the baffled official’s desk.

  “My wife made that for you,” he said.

  “Oh,” said the official, “I can’t accept that.”

  “It’s for the stamp,” said Father.

  “The stamp.”

  “On the work permit.”

  “Ah. The stamp,” said the official, looking from Father to the plastic bag on his desk and back to Father again.

  “We’re very grateful to you.”

  “I’m afraid I can’t accept it,” the man repeated, clearly embarrassed.

  “Please. I am a guest in your country. Regard it as a gift for the host.”

  “I can’t.”

  “I won’t tell anyone.”

  “The answer is still no.”

  “I saw what’s on the menu in your canteen today,” said Father. “Believe me, you do want this baklava.”

  “I’m sure it’s perfectly delicious baklava,” protested the man, “but I’m afraid I can’t accept it.”

  “Maybe I should have a word with your boss?”

  “No,” cried the official. “No, Mr. …”

  “El-Hourani. You can call me Brahim.”

  “Mr. el-Hourani, please give my regards to your wife and tell her what a pleasant surprise this was. But my wife is baking a cake this evening, and if I eat your pastries beforehand, I’ll be in trouble at home.”

  “In trouble? With your wife? You’re not serious.”

  “I am serious.”

  “Well, we don’t want that, do we,” said my father.

  “No, we don’t.”

  “All right, then.” Father took the bag off the desk. “Thank you very much for your help all the same. And if you ever do fancy some baklava, just give us a ring.”

  Then Mother recounted how Father came home and declared with a sigh, “In Beirut, if you need something stamped, you take baklava to the guy with the stamp beforehand. Here they won’t even accept the baklava after they’ve given you the stamp.”

  The official didn’t forget my father in a hurry. How could he? He saw him on three further occasions, when Father accompanied men he knew from the sports hall. Each time, he asked the official for a stamp. Each time, he got it.

  The preliminary decision was soon followed by the final one. My parents were granted asylum and received permanent residence permits as well. Father got a job in a youth centre where many foreign kids spent the afternoons. He helped them with German after school, and they were happy to learn from him as he was such a good role model. He earned a lot of respect among the youngsters. One time he managed to invite a well-known graffiti artist to the centre. Between them they sprayed and decorated the grey exterior, transforming it into a colourful landscape full of Coca-Cola rivers, lollipop trees, and chocolate mountains with ice-cream peaks. A bit like the wonderful planet Amal.

  Mother loved sewing. She would buy fabric at knock-down prices at the local flea market and make up dresses on a sewing machine that also came from the flea market. Father set up a corner for her in the living room, and she’d work in the pool of light cast by a desk lamp that wasn’t quite tall enough, threading the needle and guiding the fabric with steady hands as the machine stitched and whirred. She sold the dresses through thrift shops, often earning ten times what the fabric had cost her. When she’d saved up enough money, she had business cards printed and designed a label to sew on to the dresses. “It doesn’t matter which you choose: Rana or el-Hourani,” Father said, “They both sound like designer labels.” She went for Rana, and that became her brand name. One afternoon—I was six maybe—Mother got a phone call. It was Mrs. Demerici, whose surname, according to Mother, was actually Beck, except she’d married a Turk, the man who owned the thrift shop not far from the pedestrian shopping area. When Mother hung up, her face was glowing with pleasure. “A woman who bought one of my dresses wants to meet me,” she exclaimed, grabbing my hands and dancing round the tiny living room. This was in our old flat, where I had been born in 1984. The woman’s name was Agnes Jung, it transpired, and she really liked mother’s sewing. Agnes Jung intended to change her name to Agnes Kramer in the near future, wanted Mother to make her four bridesmaids dresses, and was willing to pay so handsomely that Mother almost fainted before she managed to collapse into the living-room armchair. She spent the next few weeks sewing day and night. The bridesmaids eventually came for a fitting, and Mother kept making apologies for the neighbourhood and the size of our flat, and saying how much she hoped the ladies liked the dresses. They disappeared into my parents’ bedroom for the fittings, and Mother put the key in the door from the inside so that the keyhole was no good to me.

  When Yasmin and I were little, she spent a lot of time in our house. Hakim was in the workshop during the day. My mother sewed from home, and Yasmin was like a daughter to her. We got on well. What I liked about Yasmin was that she never made me feel like a little boy, even though she was two years older. Her eyes were dark brown and incredibly deep, and her long black curls always had a glossy shine. Her hair was usually falling into her face as if she’d just come through a storm. There was something untamed and boyish about her, but only when we were rambling around the flats on our own. She’d break branches off trees and drag them behind her, as if she was marking a boundary. She was better at climbing than me and never tore her clothes. There was an aura of effortlessness about her, yet you were sure to fail if you tried to compete. The results were obvious: I was always coming home with new holes in my trousers and pullovers, which would have to be patched and darned by Mother. Yasmin was quite the chameleon—in adult company, she was always perfectly behaved. She was polite, said thank-you for her dinner, and, unlike me, never put her elbows on the table during meals. She could also be patient and sit still for ages while Mother ran the brush through her hair over and over. I don’t think any of the grown-ups would have believed me if I’d told them the other things Yasmin got up to.

  That flat, in which I spent the first seven years of my life, was too small for three people, and describing it as dingy would be an understatement. Nearly all the walls were stained, and they were paper-thin too. Pots clattered constantly through the walls, TVs were too loud, heavy shoes clomped on bare floorboards. You didn’t even need to strain your ears to hear
what the neighbours were fighting about—if you could understand the language, that is. There were many different nationalities in this housing scheme: Russians, Italians, Poles, Romanians, Chinese, Turks, Lebanese, Syrians, and even a few Africans—Nigerians, I think. The satellite dishes on our balconies pointed in many different directions. Between the buildings, in the middle of a walled courtyard, there was a tiny playground. A bunch of older teenagers usually hung out there, smoking. It was full of broken glass, and if there was a lot of rain, the playground flooded and turned into a mucky lake. Yasmin and I never went there to play. In front of the buildings, the bicycles at the bike stands nearly always had their saddles or wheels stolen. And if you only locked your bike to the stand by the front wheel, you could be sure the frame would be gone the next day. Even buggies got stolen from halls and landings.

  Sometimes Yasmin and I would try to sniff out where the different families hailed from—a “guess which country” game to keep ourselves amused. We’d walk along the dark passageways, their walls smeared in permanent marker, the neon lighting usually flickering, and the smell of disinfectant everywhere. When we were sure no one could see us, we’d go down on our knees or lie on our stomachs for a few seconds and put our noses to the crack of a door. Because there’d always be someone cooking somewhere, and we’d try to guess from the spices and other ingredients where the occupants came from. Mostly the smell was of cooking oil though, and very occasionally the door of the flat would open the minute we lay down in front of it. Then we’d jump up and scarper down the stuffy stairwells until we were completely out of breath. Once we’d reached safety, we’d laugh triumphantly, our lungs screaming for air, our hearts thumping wildly.

  The many passageways, nooks, and crannies in our blocks of flats were a paradise for children who loved secrets and needed space away from the world of grown-ups. The grown-ups’ world—in our flats, that meant the faces with downturned mouths. The parents with tired eyes who dragged themselves and their shopping bags up the stairs we hid under. Or the raised voices that filtered through the doors like the songs of sad ghosts.

  One day when Yasmin and I were wandering aimlessly through the stairwells, not registering which turns we were taking, we ended up in the basement, in front of a door with peeling paintwork that we’d never seen before. Yasmin pushed the handle down gingerly. The door wasn’t locked. Behind it was a small room and a pallet bed with a crumpled purple sleeping bag on it. The floor was littered with empty beer and schnapps bottles, and we found lots of syringes near the bed. There was no window, just an air vent with a thick layer of dust on the grating. The air was musty and a nasty smell assaulted your nose every time you inhaled. But there was also a shelf with tools on it—a hammer, pliers, wire, some rubber hose. And a large box full of artificial flowers. We had stumbled on what used to be the caretaker’s cubbyhole. At one stage, our flats had a full-time caretaker, and this was presumably where he hung out. Now all the maintenance work was handled by the local authorities, and they only sent someone out as a last resort. This little room must have served as a hide-out for homeless people or junkies for quite some time. Yasmin took a flower from the box—there were a couple of hundred in it—and dusted the petals off on her sleeve. They were red.

  “This is no place for a flower,” she said, looking at the colourful object in her hand, which seemed as out of place among all the greys as a Pop Art print in a prison cell.

  “I have an idea,” she said, her brown eyes twinkling.

  Adventure beckoned, I followed.

  We sneaked back to the cubbyhole several times over the following days. Once we were sure everything stayed exactly the same between visits, we could safely assume that no one lived there anymore. We had found a secret place of our own, a magic room in an enchanted realm. It was Yasmin’s idea to take the flowers to the world of grown-ups and brighten it a little. “Everyone loves flowers,” she stated categorically, and there was no contradicting that. But there were more flats in our place than we had flowers, so we decided on a selection process: “Whenever we hear fighting or see someone sad going into their flat, we’ll put a flower outside their door,” she decided. “But they only get the flower once.”

  After that, whenever we heard someone shouting while we were on our rambles, we chalked a small cross on the bottom right of the door frame so that we’d find it again. Sometimes we hid round a corner so that we’d see people’s reaction to the surprise splash of colour in the daily grey. We never actually saw anyone coming out, but when we went back to the scene later, the flowers were always gone. So we imagined the people finding them, picking them up, and smelling them. They’d peer furtively up and down the corridor before closing the door and putting the flower in a vase in the window, even though the flower wasn’t a real one. We had great fun with this flower game; when we’d go back to the flat, Mother would ask what we’d been up to, but we never said a thing, just exchanged surreptitious smiles across the table.

  There was often trouble with the police in our flats. Some of the kids hanging around the playground boasted that we lived in a place the cops were afraid to go after dark. They claimed to be kings of the streets once the sun went down. But it wasn’t true. The police often came after dark. We’d see them and their torches through the window, entering one of the blocks and reappearing a short time later, hauling someone off to the station. The cops were definitely not afraid of our place, and I often saw them picking up one of the so-called kings.

  If where we lived bothered my father, he didn’t let it show, though I may have been too young to notice. He liked his job in the youth centre, and Mother managed to build up a regular customer base for her dresses. They were content, my parents, but money was always scarce. Father regularly had to send money home to his mother, my grandmother, who had refused to leave the country when they did. He explained this to me many times. The money was mainly for doctor’s bills and medicine. One day when I asked why she hadn’t left with them in the first place, or why she couldn’t at least join us in Germany now, he just smiled and said, “It’s Lebanon. No one wants to leave.”

  During our seventh year in that flat, Mother became pregnant for the second time. Now the place was definitely too small, and since we lived on the sixth floor, and the lift broke down almost every day, my parents decided it was time to move. Hakim agreed. Yasmin and I were thrilled. Besides, we had run out of flowers by then.

  -

  5

  In that warm late summer of 1992 when we found our new home, I was seven, Yasmin nine. She and Hakim moved into the flat below us, which was similar in layout but a little smaller. On this street, nearly all the satellite dishes pointed 26 degrees east. We were happy. In the schoolyard, we swapped Diddl Mouse characters and sealed friendships with colourful bracelets; Bill Clinton took the presidential oath; and Take That sang “Could It Be Magic.” In Lebanon, the general election was held, and everything seemed to be heading in the right direction. Things were looking good. I felt like I was part of an animal pack calmly awaiting autumn and winter, safe in the knowledge that we had plentiful supplies and a warm and cosy den.

  So there we were a few weeks after moving in, watching TV in the living room, the usual images of post-election Beirut. Hakim had told me the Syrian joke and I’d laughed. Father didn’t laugh, though, which reminded me how distracted he’d seemed of late and how rarely he was in good humour. Instead, he’d scratch the back of his neck abstractedly, seeming to stare right through the walls, yet not seeing anything. He spoke very little and withdrew into himself. In the evenings he would sometimes disappear for hours at a time after dinner; out walking, he said. If I started putting on my shoes and jacket in the hall to go with him, he’d be gone before I was ready, the door closed behind him. Sometimes I imagined that his limp was worse when he got back. I didn’t know my father without the limp. It was part of him, as normal as the colour of his eyes. If you didn’t know he had a limp, you’d barely
notice it, except when Father exerted himself. He still walked very straight, but his head was bowed and he rarely looked at me. Whenever I managed to catch his eye, he’d give me a smile, but he wouldn’t say much, and he’d usually turn away quickly, as if he felt ill at ease or caught out. It sounded more like he was sighing than breathing then, a strained breath coming from somewhere very deep, as if he’d had to climb a thousand steps. Sometimes, in passing, he would stroke my head with his big hand. His eyes looked red occasionally, as if he’d been crying. But that’s just a guess—I never did see Father cry.

  Then there was the other extreme. Times I’d look over at him and find him staring at me, his eyes glued to me as if I had some weird marking on my forehead. Moments when I felt there was a tortured look in his eyes, just for a split second, before he’d catch me watching him and force a little smile. If he gave me a hug when he was in this kind of mood, he’d squeeze me far too tight, wouldn’t want to let go. I’d stick it out, even if it nearly hurt. And if he spoke to me in moments like these, he’d talk really fast, without so much as a pause, as if he was trying to stop me getting up and leaving, to keep me sitting there listening. He’d gesticulate wildly and try to make it all sound very exciting, which worked every time. He did all this with my sister too, though I don’t think she really got it. What worried me most of all about Father’s behaviour was that he didn’t talk to Mother. If she addressed him, he would just lift his head slowly and nod in awkward silence. For some reason, he couldn’t bear to look her in the eye.