The Storyteller

by Pierre Jarawan

  Yet the curse remained—never being able to trust my luck, never allowing myself to be happy for too long, always suspecting disaster lurking behind every beautiful day, every wonderful moment. And paradoxically, the more I came back to life in the present, the greater my desire became to find out once and for all why Father had left me almost twenty years earlier.

  Strolling through town one day, the last-minute offers and pictures of palm-fringed beaches in a travel agent’s window caught our eye.

  “Wouldn’t you like to go to Lebanon some time?” I asked Yasmin. “To see where we’re from, get to know the home country?”

  “This is our home,” was all she said. She buried her hands in her jacket pockets and gazed at the turquoise sea on a poster.

  Broaching the subject of a trip to Lebanon was tricky. While for me it was the country my father was from, where I suspected he was now, and also the land of the Abu Youssef stories, for Yasmin, Lebanon was where her mother had died.

  “There’s nothing there for me,” she’d always reply. Maybe she was throwing cold water on my longing for Lebanon because she wanted to cure me of this obsession. Maybe she felt I was having a relapse. In any case, she made her position pretty clear. “When our parents fled to Germany, they had next to nothing. They fled in the hope that we, their children, would have better lives. By deciding to come here, leaving everything behind, they gave us the gift of a home. They made it possible for us to lead lives we would never have had if they hadn’t left.” She paused, brushed her hair out of her face, and continued in a quiet voice. “There’s nothing waiting for me in Lebanon. This is my home. I want my father to be proud of me. I want to show him that giving up his former life for my sake was not in vain, that I’m grateful to him for all the good and the bad.”

  It was only a matter of time before I slid back into old habits. Once an addict, always an addict. It started with me staying at work a little longer to pore over books. I knew the sickening pleasure of it would be short-lived. Now that I was in charge of acquisitions at the library, I made sure that the holdings on Lebanon grew slowly but surely. I knew it was wrong but I couldn’t resist. I no longer stole anything, but I read as much as I possibly could. More and more often, I lost track of time, buried in books, and arrived home late to find Yasmin gone out and a plate of cold food waiting on the kitchen table. In the mornings, I took a roundabout route to the station, just so I could hear the muezzin’s call at the mosque, and if I was at the market, buying from one of the Arab stallholders, I’d insist on speaking Arabic.

  Yasmin had a wide circle of friends, but I didn’t find it easy to fit in. When we were younger, we used to go to clubs and bars, but now we were at the stage where most of our friends were getting married, having babies, or inviting each other to garden parties. The topics of conversation would be the weirdos next door, or work, or the best barbecue lighters, or prenatal courses—all of which seemed utterly banal compared to what was going on my mind. I felt more like a hanger-on than a genuine companion, so I’d stand on the periphery swirling my glass, sucking ice cubes, and smiling politely until it was time to leave.

  The signs were there, some more obvious than others, and it seemed like I was heading in the wrong direction again. Something inevitable was brewing. We both felt it.

  “You seem so unsettled again these days,” Yasmin said one night. We were in bed, staring at the dark ceiling.

  Unsettled. That was the word she used to describe my mood. She turned over on her side. I curled into her, put my arm around her, and breathed in the smell of her hair, her skin. But even then I wasn’t fully with her; my mind was already on a journey.

  “We will continue on this path. We will shoulder this responsibility and accept the sacrifices and consequences that come with this responsibility.” Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah was speaking on TV. A coffin draped in a yellow flag was being carried through Beirut. Hundreds of people were lining the streets and reaching out to touch the coffin, which held the body of a Hezbollah fighter who had fallen in Syria. Men had been coming home in coffins for weeks now. I’d been following it on the news. Lebanese Hezbollah were fighting on Assad’s side in a civil war that was none of Lebanon’s business. This really exposed their masquerade for what it was. Up to this point, Hezbollah had always used the fight against Israel to justify their existence and their arms, but the Syrian civil war was nothing to do with that.

  “They’ve no choice,” said Hakim, who was sitting in front of the TV in his living room. “If Assad weren’t in power in Syria, Hezbollah would have a serious problem.”

  Yasmin was on the couch, flicking through a brochure.

  “Because of the direct support that Assad gives them,” I said.

  Hakim nodded and poured water from the terracotta jug straight into his mouth. Then he wiped his lips with the back of his hand.

  “But primarily because of Iran. Syria is the link between Lebanon and Iran. No one supports the Shias in Lebanon as much as those two countries. If Syria falls into the hands of the rebels, the supply lines will be cut off.”

  The fighting had spread all over Syria at this stage. Hundreds of thousands of civilians had fled to Lebanon. TV images from the border area showed shivering women and children who’d been caught in unexpected snow. Syrian refugees led camera teams through their miserable makeshift huts in Beirut, past dripping water pipes and jury-rigged power lines. Northern Lebanon became the stronghold of the anti-Assad activists, who were training fighters and preparing for a war on his regime. This led to many bloody encounters right on the border.

  None of that put me off. The sense that Lebanon—like me—was walking a dangerous tightrope only strengthened my desire to go there. Lebanon had become a refuge for so many millions. Why not for me as well?

  Yasmin and I had been having more arguments, and they were getting fiercer. The contrast between the trajectories our lives had followed since childhood was never as stark as in these heated moments.

  “You have Baba,”—her father—“you have Alina, and you have me, Samir. But you still feel something’s missing?” This was only a few weeks after Alina’s wedding.

  “I’m sorry,” I replied. But that’s what I always said, so it just made Yasmin angrier.

  “If you were genuinely sorry, you’d make some effort to change,” she said. “But I hardly see you. You come home at all hours and won’t tell me what you’ve been doing. It’d be nice to spend the evening together sometime, just you and me watching a movie on the couch, but you’re glued to the news all the time. Your eyes, Samir—you should see that look you get as soon as you hear the word Lebanon. I can’t understand why you’re still like this. Tell me, why is all that so much more important than you and me?”

  I couldn’t explain it. But I had a gut feeling that things would only get worse if I didn’t go looking for Father. Nothing would change if I didn’t at least try to find answers to the questions that plagued me. Yasmin knew it too.

  My gut also told me that I didn’t want to lose Yasmin. Even if I couldn’t always show it, I loved her with every bone in my body. She had hauled me ashore but I had to go the last bit of the journey on my own, hoping she’d be waiting at the other end.

  Almost exactly a year after I’d led Alina to the altar, I went to Hakim and asked for his daughter’s hand in marriage. Of course, Yasmin made all her own decisions, but somehow it felt like the right thing to do. No matter how progressive he was, or how laid-back his attitude to German customs and mores, in his heart of hearts Hakim was still proudly Lebanese.

  He had got a whole new lease of life when Yasmin moved back. He laughed more, became more agile, and now and then I’d see him in the shed, clamping a plain length of wood in the vice. His hair had turned from grey to white and was unrulier than ever. After I made my request, he stood up, joints creaking, and came over and kissed me on the forehead. Then he stood there and just looked
at me.

  “You and me, Samir …,” he said after a while. “Many’s the time I wished we’d been closer.” I went to speak, but he held up his hand. “Sadly, I failed to keep the promise I made your father. I tried to rescue you—I do realise what all those years have done to you—and I failed, I know. But Yasmin …” He took my head in his hands and looked into my eyes. “Yasmin is the light you have always been looking for. If she can’t rescue you, no one can.” Without taking his eyes off me, he continued in a slower and quieter voice. “Ana fakhur fik ya ibni.” I am proud of you, my son. “I have no right to ask you to promise anything, since I didn’t keep my own promise. But you are asking me for my daughter’s hand. She is the brightest star in my life, which is why I have to say this to you: If you wish to marry Yasmin, you must promise to love her as she deserves to be loved: unconditionally, truly, every minute of every day until you die. And you must not be a burden to her.”

  “I love her,” I said, looking straight at him. “I’ve always loved her.”

  Hakim’s old hands moved from my face to my shoulders.

  “I know,” he said, with a smile and a sigh. “I’ve always known it.”

  Yasmin followed the clues in the stories. It was a paper chase. I led her back to places that played a special role when she was growing up. They had become special places for me too. The first story took her to what had been her favourite café. The waiter handed her a menu in which she found the second story. It was about a mermaid who had left the sea years ago but longed to return to it. This led Yasmin to the old swimming pool. The man in the ticket booth, a secretive smile on his face, handed her the key to a locker, where the third story awaited her. In it, a girl is in the library studying for a difficult exam when a lonely genie suddenly emerges from the pages of a book and offers to sit the exam for her if she’ll promise to visit him regularly and keep him company. When Yasmin got to the library reading room, she made a bee-line for the spot where she used to study. There she found a piece of paper with F.ELH 2008 written on it. The F was for Fiction, so she went to that section, then started looking under E until she found a slim folder labelled EL-HOURANI between the numbers 2007 and 2009. In it was the final story, “The Paper Flower.” It is narrated by a flower that has grown out of the grey asphalt in a run-down housing scheme. The flower feels lonely, even though she is much loved. She is the only splash of colour in a sad wasteland, which is why the residents are so fond of her. As the flower grows older, her colours fade, and the people are afraid she will wither and die. But the flower doesn’t mind, since being lonely seems a worse fate. The desperate residents call on a magician, who tells the flower that he could turn her into a paper one. She would no longer have a conscious mind, but she would bloom for ever and light up the lives of the residents, who had nothing else. The flower agrees.

  Yasmin took the bus to our old address. Time had not been kind to it. The grey blocks of flats loomed like dinosaur skeletons. The perimeter wall had even more holes than the last time we’d been here, and it was covered in graffiti. The playground swing was rusting away. When Yasmin went into the courtyard, the little kings of the streets just stared at her silently. Then they went into a huddle, whispering among themselves. After a few moments, a wide-eyed girl ran to Yasmin and handed her a red paper flower. Yasmin took the flower and unfolded it. Come to the river, it said.

  I was waiting on the riverbank when she appeared between the trees and clambered down over the rocks and fallen branches. Behind her, beneath a grey sky, was the backdrop of our childhood, but Yasmin’s bright coat and eyes lit it all up like the flower in my story. She smiled at me, her cheeks rosy from the treasure hunt.

  My hands shook as I slipped the ring over her finger and looked at her with misty eyes. She nodded, and we quietly embraced while the river rushed by. She took a step back and studied her hand in the dappled light.

  “It’s a gorgeous ring,” she said. “And I do want to marry you, Samir.” She paused and looked around the familiar setting. “But I can’t.” She took off the ring, reached for my numbed hand, and placed the ring in it.

  The look on her face was tender, sad, and beautiful.

  “I love you, Samir,” she said. “You mean everything to me. But we both know you’re not ready for marriage yet.”

  Something snapped somewhere and landed with a dull thud.

  “But I love you. I always will,” I said quietly.

  “I know,” she said, stroking my cheek. “I know. But I’m thinking of the future.” Her hand moved to my shoulder and brushed off a leaf. “What if we have children, Samir? Can you handle that kind of responsibility? Will you be able to be a good father? Or will you always be afraid of making a mistake because you so desperately want to be the father you miss? You’re with him most of the time, even now, I can tell. I see it in your eyes when you’re watching the news, when you pass a man on the street who looks like him. You look for him everywhere.”

  I lowered my gaze and felt grey again, as grey as the blocks of flats behind us.

  She sighed.

  “You must go on this journey. We both know it. I can’t imagine anything better than having you by my side for the rest of my life, but you need to sort out your own life first, Samir. I thought I could help, that I could give you what you’re missing, but I can’t. Only he can. I don’t know what you’ll find there or whether you even know what you’re looking for, but if that’s what you need in order to change, then you have to go there.”

  I nodded. On the one hand, it was what I wanted, even if the chances of finding Father were slim. But I could feel my chest tightening at the thought of my future happiness with Yasmin hinging on this journey.

  “Don’t you want to come with me?” I asked. The water rushed downstream, and I already knew the answer.

  “No.” She paused. “There’s nothing there for me.”

  Would we ever stand here again, by the water? Or would we look back one day and wonder how we ever ended up on this riverbank?

  I wanted to take her hand, but she had clasped her fingers.

  “Will you still be here when I come back?”

  Yasmin looked at me. Her eyes were full of uncertainty, but her voice was steady.

  “I’ll wait for you, and if you need my help where you’re going, I’ll give you as much support as I can.” She took my hand and squeezed it. “It doesn’t matter when you come back,” she said. “The question is how you come back.”

  -

  19

  He’d still be alive if I hadn’t come here. I stagger like a drunk through streets flanked by housing blocks. He died because of me. I’ve no idea where I am. It’s late, I’m exhausted, but I daren’t close my eyes. My T-shirt is stuck to me, my eyes are dry from the heat, my tongue feels thick in my mouth. When did I last have anything to drink?

  My rucksack is weighing me down. My shoes are covered in dust. I reach into my pocket and find the ring. Yasmin. It feels heavy on the flat of my palm. The little diamond has an orange glint from the street lights.

  I texted her earlier. I couldn’t phone. How could I have explained it? Still in Beirut. Will be in touch. S. She was probably already waiting at the airport by then.

  The traffic rushes by, I turn into a side street, lean against the wall to catch my breath. I put the ring back in my pocket. How on earth did I get into this mess?

  The guilty mantra goes round in my head—I shouldn’t have left him on his own, I should have taken the keys off him. He died because of me. I’m falling into a black hole. There’s nothing to catch me, and when I land, I’ll be back in Germany, sitting on the side of the bed, more broken than ever, and Yasmin will be packing her bags. Because I’ll have disappointed her yet again.

  After an eternity of wandering aimlessly, I collapse onto a chair in a bar and put the rucksack down beside me. The music is Arabic, not club music. I still haven’t a clue where I a
m, but I can hear the sea, so the Corniche can’t be too far away. No tourists here. I stand out, feel eyes on me. Puffs of smoke from shisha pipes on the tables. I order a beer. It arrives lukewarm. I am dazed. I open my rucksack and root for the diary. Maybe the weight of it in my hand can restore the sense of safety I’d felt among the mourners at Nabil’s, before I left the house and fell apart outside, alone again.

  I’d always thought of it as a treasure map that would show me the way, a secret book full of codes to be cracked, sentences pointing to Father like road signs. But I’d overestimated the importance of the diary. Or had I? Part of me still feels it must be more than a collection of anecdotes. I can’t explain why. But now, as I leaf through it and look at Father’s wobbly writing, it’s not telling me anything. All I can hear is Amir’s voice: There is no road leading to him. They all lead back to the beginning. And that’s where you are. You and only you. And it’s up to you to decide what happens next. But the voice is very far away, and Hakim’s whisper takes its place: If he left any clues as to where he is or why he had to leave, you’ll find them in his diary.

  Two men are staring at me. When I look over, they raise their glasses. I raise mine in return and they look away. I drink the beer in one go. The alcohol and the heat are making me feel a bit woozy. I think those guys are talking about me. They keep looking over. When I count out the money and leave it on the table, one of them digs the other in the ribs and they quickly finish their drinks.

  I stuff my wallet and the diary into the rucksack. The photo of Father and Bashir is tucked into an inner slip pocket. By the time I stand up, the men are gone. I didn’t even see them leave. I can feel the other customers’ eyes on my back as I walk out onto the street.

  The sea must be very close. I can smell it as well as hear it. The air is moist and salty, just how I imagined it as a child. The lights of the buildings towering above me eclipse the stars in the infinitely black sky.