Between Beirut and the Moon

by A. Naji Bakhti

  BETWEEN

  BEIRUT

  AND

  THE

  MOON

  A. Naji Bakhti

  For my mother and father

  CONTENTS

  TITLE PAGE

  DEDICATION

  BETWEEN BEIRUT AND THE MOON

  A LESSON IN BUDDHISM

  ALJAHIZ AND MONSIEUR MERMIER

  THE OLDSMOBILE

  MOTHER AND FATHER

  THE MACARENA

  THE DON

  YURI GAGARIN

  SHAWKI AND ESTELLE

  THE REVOLUTION

  CANNONBALL

  CAPTAIN DRUZE

  ANDALUSIA AND THE MOORS

  A RIP IN SPACE AND TIME

  T-54 AND OTHER STORIES

  THE GOAT

  THE ASTRONAUT

  BEIRUT INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  COPYRIGHT

  BETWEEN BEIRUT AND THE MOON

  I heard this theory once that if you toss a newborn into a swimming pool he’ll come out the other side kicking. I find that highly improbable. My father, or so I believe, has always been a strong advocate of the theory. Instead of water, however, he chose books. And instead of infants, he chose the entirety of his son’s and daughter’s combined childhoods. In more than one sense, my sister and I have been kicking through books for most of our lives. The idea was that if you expose a child to literature long and hard enough, he’ll grow up wanting to be a writer, a critic, an editor or the J.R.R. Tolkien Professor of English Literature and Language at the University of Oxford. Of course, I wanted to be an astronaut.

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ he’d say, ‘who ever heard of an Arab on the moon?’

  ‘I’ll be the first one,’ I replied at once, instead of taking the usual route of trying to look as non-ridiculous as possible, for my father’s liking.

  ‘You’re flat-footed. They don’t allow flat-footed Arabs on the moon,’ he remarked casually, his face hidden behind this morning’s An-Nahar Daily, ‘it’s illegal.’

  ‘Who said?’

  ‘Jesus-Mohammad-Christ said, that’s who.’

  That was another thing my father would say with unerring regularity. As if Jesus’ middle name had always been Mohammad and everyone in the world had thus far simply failed to spot this most obvious truth. One expected nothing less of a Muslim man who had forged an unholy alliance with a Christian woman against the wishes of his now irritated family and his now pissed-off god, whom, one would have thought, must have known in advance and ought to have had ample time to cope.

  ‘How many times have I told you not to dash your son’s dreams?’ my mother cautioned, as she made her way towards the balcony, cigarette in mouth and all. She was being generous today. Usually, she would spend most of her leisure time in the living room creating a cloud of smoke in front of her and then struggling to make out the images being displayed on the TV. ‘He can do anything he sets his mind to.’

  ‘Next you’ll be telling him he can walk on water. God knows we have a hard enough time getting from one country to another without being held back for a cavity search. They’ll shove a fucking Hubble telescope, mother and father, up his backside before they let him get on that space shuttle,’ he said.

  ‘Mother and father’ is a colloquial term used in Lebanon to express the idea of something whole or complete. For instance, the weight of the explosion knocked the man, mother and father, right out of the window, as men in Beirut occasionally are; or the building collapsed, mother and father, to the ground, as buildings in Beirut occasionally do.

  A LESSON IN BUDDHISM

  When, in school, I was grilled on the subject of my religion by my classmates, I would respond with a shrug as bewildering to my inquisitors as it was to me. I knew that church was for Christians and mosque for MusliMs I knew this because both Christian and church begin with the letters ‘C’ and ‘H’, and because both Muslim and mosque begin with the letters ‘M’ and ‘O’, if you should choose to spell Moslem as such, but don’t. I knew that the mosque was the one that smelt of feet on any given day, but particularly on Friday; and not nice nail-polished lady feet either, but thick-skinned and hairy man feet. I knew this because my friend, Mohammad, was Muslim and he smelt of feet on any given day, but particularly on Friday.

  Mohammad had devised a game, or so he told us. He hadn’t. All he had done was learn it off of his big brother.

  ‘Christian or Muslim?’ he asked one day during break, extending two clenched and clammy fists and imploring me to pick one.

  I picked Muslim because, in Arabic, it means peace and, I reasoned, no harm could come of peace. The Arabic word for Christian bore an uncomfortable resemblance to the Arabic word for crocodile, and I was not especially fond of crocodiles at the time.

  Mohammad slapped me straight across my left cheek with his clammy right hand and ran. He hid behind the teacher’s desk for what seemed like more than ten minutes and I eventually gave up looking for him and forgave him instead. The next day I asked him where he was all afternoon and he said he was hiding behind the teacher’s desk for the first ten minutes and had since then found his mother, walked home with her, done his homework, watched Boy Meets World, went to sleep, woke up, brushed his teeth, skipped breakfast and walked straight to school.

  ‘Nothing,’ he said, before reciting the above activities to me in that same order.

  From a distance I observed as Mohammad extended his still clammy fists to an older boy whom I had only known by name. Mohammad then struck the older boy, Boulos, across his right cheek. Boulos made an instinctive gesture as if to react. His arm was half-raised and in pole position to strike when he slowly and gradually began to lower it.

  ‘You’re Christian, Boulos. You can’t slap back. You see. Those are the rules of the game,’ said Mohammad, smiling triumphantly. ‘I know it’s not fair,’ he continued, ‘don’t blame me. Take it up with your own god.’

  It was true that my mother had never made to slap me across the face, nor had my father for that matter, but it was also true that the sole of her shoe had narrowly missed the tip of my nose and the top of my head on countless different occasions. Of course, on these occasions the sole of my mother’s shoe had long since left my mother’s foot and was making its own pilgrimage from her hand to whichever part of my body it had set out to reach. My mother may have been Christian but her shoe, almost definitely, was not Christian.

  ‘Am I Muslim or Christian?’ I asked my Christian mother over dinner. The family had been sitting before the TV set, each with a tray on his or her lap, for at least half an hour watching my father’s favourite Comedy Sketch programme: Basmeet ElWatan, which literally translates to ‘The Death of a Nation’, or alternatively, ‘The Smiles of a Nation’, depending on the manner in which one chooses to read the title. The TV set was old with vinyl wood varnish and knobs rather than buttons and my little sister’s nimble fingers rather than a remote control. The story which my parents had upheld thus far was that either my sister or I had hidden the remote control somewhere within the house when we were very young and forgotten about it. They had searched for the remote countless times before, of course, and were eventually forced to concede that it was lost forever. We, my sister and I, had to pay the price for our mistake by getting up to change the channel every time one of our parents decided they didn’t like the programme they were watching. As I was almost twice my sister’s age at the time, it often fell to her to change the channel.

  ‘Technically, neither,’ my father replied absent-mindedly, drawing a stern look from my mother and failing to notice both her stern look and my concerned expression.

  ‘Both, Adam
,’ my mother said, seeking to reassure me in some way.

  ‘Yes, but if I had to pick one, which would it be?’ I asked again.

  ‘I heard Buddism is alright. Try that,’ my father said, smiling and winking to himself.

  ‘How many times have I told you not to confuse your son?’ my mother remarked.

  ‘I’m only laying out his options in front of him, darling,’ he replied.

  The conversation then went in the direction of Buddhism and how they, the Buddhists, worship a short, fat and bald man, who looked remarkably like my uncle Gamal and who had spent most of his days naked and attempting to lift himself off the ground without the effort of moving his legs. He sounded, to me, like a more obese version of Jesus but without the long and fair hair and the glimmering blue eyes.

  ‘Glimmering blue eyes? Where do you think Jesus was born? Sweden?’ my father interjected, now turning his attention away from the TV set for the first time in the conversation.

  ‘Australia,’ my sister replied with an air of authority which belied her tender age of six.

  ‘Why Australia, Fara?’ my father asked tugging at one of her ponytails playfully. Only my father called my sister ‘Fara’. It means mouse.

  ‘Why not?’ she said, adjusting her ponytail.

  The general consensus was that, as God would not have consciously and willingly overseen the evolution of the kangaroo, he must’ve turned his back on Australia for a good few thousand years and so could not have sent his own son to that overgrown island two thousand or so years ago. The only link my sister and I could find between Jesus and Australia, years later, would be Mel Gibson, an Australian actor and director, who directed the movie Passion of the Christ. My sister maintains, to this day, that her answer was prophetic.

  ‘He was born in the Middle East. He was probably tanned, had a long black beard, thick black eyebrows and dark black eyes,’ my father said, running his thumb and index finger over his thick, black moustache, ‘like bin Laden.’

  A week or so later, as he dropped me off to school, my father leaned over and explained that there were quite a few advantages to being a child of a ‘mixed marriage’, chief among them the ability to switch back and forth between both religions at one’s own convenience. By that point, Mohammad’s game had spread and most children, Muslim and Christian, had been slapped across their cheek at least once. Whenever we saw two of our classmates chasing one another during recess we knew that they were both Muslim and that the one being chased had just slapped his chaser straight across the face. The Christian boys, as you would expect, did not like this game very much, but none of them slapped back or chased their aggressor because they were Christian and Christians must turn the other cheek, or so Mohammad, and countless other Muslim boys, had told them.

  ‘I want to play again,’ I told Mohammad, who shrugged his shoulders and extended his arms to reveal both his clenched and clammy fists.

  ‘Muslim or Christian?’

  ‘Christian,’ I said smiling.

  ‘I thought you said you were Muslim.’

  ‘I did. But I changed my mind. My mum’s Christian. I can do that,’ I replied, victoriously.

  Mohammad slapped me across the face and stood there laughing with four or five other Muslim boys, all of whom had latched themselves onto Mohammad ever since he’d introduced his now popular game to the playground. I did not wait for Mohammad to finish his laugh before reaching over and slapping him with the back of my hand across his right cheek as hard as I could.

  ‘That’s not how it works,’ he said. ‘You’re Christian, you can’t slap back. Ask your god.’

  I asked him, I thought, and he said it’s fine by him if I go back to being a Muslim for the next few minutes. But I didn’t say it. I didn’t say anything. I slapped Mohammad again and again. The fourth slap knocked him off his feet. He made a helpless effort to punch back as he fell to the floor, swinging his fist in the general direction of my face. I pinned him to the floor and began to punch his face wildly. I imagined that he was an alien life form which I had come across in one of my journeys to outer space, whose sole aim was to spread a disease that would divide the entire human race into tiny little groups of men and women who fought endlessly amongst themselves and achieved progress only sporadically. None of his newly acquired friends came to his aid and they were joined by more spectators, mostly young Christian boys who were led to the scene by the mere smell of retribution.

  As I sat there in the principal’s office thinking about what I’d done, my mother and father were escorted to the leather chairs either side of the one I had been occupying for the best part of an hour.

  ‘Sit, they’re not just for decoration, you know,’ the principal, Ms Iman, said, tapping one of the leather chairs on its back and looking up at my father.

  My father does not take too kindly to being told what to do by anyone, especially marginally younger women, and would likely have been much more cooperative throughout the remainder of the meeting had she, the principal, politely asked him to please take a seat without tapping any one of the leather chairs on the back and without making a remark about their function in an office. I was glad she had done both.

  ‘Are you happy about what you’ve done, Adam?’ asked the principal, leaning forward and staring me intently in the eye.

  She was one of those women who had once been startlingly beautiful but who’d since deliberately taken the decision to cut her hair short, develop myopia and age a few years in order to be taken more seriously by her male colleagues.

  ‘Yes,’ I replied, knowing that it was perhaps not the answer she was looking for.

  ‘You see, the boy shows no remorse,’ she said, addressing my parents and filling them in on the details of the incident.

  ‘It seems to me that my son was involved in a fight with another boy. Now where is that other boy?’ my father inquired.

  ‘Your son broke his nose. He’s in the hospital,’ she replied, raising her right eyebrow.

  ‘That hardly seems fair.’

  ‘What, that your son broke the boy’s nose? Or that the boy is receiving medical treatment at the hospital?’

  ‘My son’s arms are covered with little scratches which, clearly, have been left unattended,’ my father said, putting both his hands on the desk before him and adjusting his seating position. ‘This boy fights like a little girl.’

  I chuckled and received a stern look from both my mother and the principal, who evidently thought that my father’s remark was neither funny nor was I entitled to laugh at it. I looked at my arm and noticed the tiny scratches for the first time. They hurt more now that I was aware of them. A tear must’ve escaped me as both of their expressions soon softened.

  ‘What do you want to be when you grow up?’ the principal asked, looking straight at me.

  Ms Iman’s what-do-you-want-to-be-when-you-grow-up lecture was infamous throughout the school. There was not a student summoned into her office who had not been on the receiving end of one. It went something like this: what do you want to be when you grow up? A doctor/ engineer/ lawyer/ businessman/ teacher. And do you think doctors/ engineers/ lawyers/ businessmen/teachers punch one another in the face? No. Exactly, now apologise to your classmate.

  To say that it is inherently flawed is an understatement. That the moral fibre of a human being is essentially tied to his occupation is ridiculous. Even as eleven-year-olds, we were well aware of that.

  ‘An astronaut,’ I replied.

  ‘An astronaut?’ she repeated, turning over to look at my mother who shrugged her shoulders and smiled politely. ‘Whoever heard of an Arab on the moon?’

  Out of the corner of my eye, I saw my father slap his forehead audibly with the palm of his right hand, then slap his right hand with the palm of his left one.

  ‘The point is you shouldn’t resort to violence every time someone insults your religion. It’s why the entire country has gone to the dogs. Is that clear?’ asked the principal.

  ‘
Yes, Ms Iman,’ I replied, occupying myself with the elaborate pattern of the Persian carpet on the floor.

  ‘Hold on. You’ve had a student spreading sectarianism around the school for the past month and you’re concerned that my son has found an unorthodox way of putting an end to it?’ my father asked.

  ‘Unorthodox? It’s completely orthodox, Mr Najjar, that’s the problem,’ she said, somewhat impatiently, ‘this is not the first time your son has been involved in acts of indiscipline, or blasphemy for that matter. Just last week, he asked the Civic Studies teacher whether Jesus Christ existed in the same way that Santa Claus did.’

  ‘Well, with all due respect Ms Iman, what the hell was Jesus Christ doing in a Civic Studies class at a secular school anyway?’ my father asked.

  ‘Calm down,’ my mother said, nudging her husband in the ribs.

  ‘And a month or so ago – tell your father what you said about the Prophet,’ she demanded, addressing me and completely ignoring my father’s question.

  ‘I asked the Arabic teacher whether, after commanding Mohammad to read, God then smacked him on the back of the head with the Koran, like you did to me with Oliver Twist,’ I said, staring bluntly at my father.

  ‘In all honesty, son, if Mohammad was anything like you, then God must’ve done, yes,’ he replied.

  ‘I will not have blasphemy in my office,’ said Ms Iman.

  ‘Do you know who I am, Ms Iman?’ My father had just invoked the quintessential Lebanese statement which often preceded an indisputable declaration of war between two mostly rational adults.

  It doesn’t matter if you’re a second-rate citizen living from pay cheque to pay cheque, with a modest background, no ancestors to speak of and earning barely enough money to feed your eight hungry children, in Lebanon you will ask this question of anyone who rubs you the wrong way and wait for them to ask you it back.

  ‘Do you know who I am, Mr Najjar?’

  Of course, neither of them knew who the other really was. Neither of them really cared to find out. My mother, suspecting as much, stood up, apologised to Ms Iman, told her that I would be severely punished at home and asked for Mohammad’s mother’s phone number so that she may call her and apologise personally. I don’t know what my mother said, but I never heard from Mohammad or his mother again.