Between Beirut and the Moon

by A. Naji Bakhti

  ‘And then?’

  And then he told her about how, on his way back with Abou Talal, he had been ambushed by two Christian militiamen who demanded the briefcase, how he had been forced to fling the briefcase as far and as high as he could while he held them off, how the briefcase had burst open in the air, how random people on the street had danced to the tune of paper falling from the sky and how, for a brief moment, it was raining liras on Hamra Street.

  When the story was over my grandmother had her head in her hands and my mother was standing over my sister with an arm around her. My father looked at me and shrugged his shoulders. These were fabrications, he knew. But he would not stop my grandfather in full flow.

  ‘Go into the bedroom, and let the adults talk,’ my father said, ‘all of you.’

  He meant the kids. Including myself, my sister and twelve or so of my forty-two cousins who happened to be present on the day, no doubt also dragged to the congregation by their parents. The teenagers hung out in one corner of my father’s old bedroom, and mostly ignored us. The twenty-somethings were not really kids but they too were happy to vacate the living room upon my father’s command. They lingered by the door. Looking back, I sometimes think it was a consciously symbolic gesture, an affirmation of their status as those to whom adulthood was just beyond the threshold of my father’s old bedroom door. But we were kids and I suspect that it was more an expression of their dominion over the younger ones: us. They kept peering into the bedroom and rarely poked their head outside to see if the atmosphere was ripe for an induction into adulthood. Only the toddlers ignored my father, mostly because they could not understand him, or anyone for that matter, but also because there were no consequences to their actions. They picked their noses or made funny little noises, they clapped their hands together or cried or crawled around on the ground between this uncle’s legs or past that aunt’s pointy heels.

  The rest of us occupied the bed. We were the youngest of the bunch in my father’s old bedroom, but we were the loudest and most comfortable around a bed. This subgroup of cousins included my Aunt Sonia’s two younger girls, Yara and Lara, and my Uncle Gamal’s eldest daughter, Ferial. We were all about the same age, apart from my sister.

  Yara crawled towards the centre of the bed. She craned her neck, surveying the room with caution before leaning in my direction.

  ‘You know that it’s made-up nonsense, don’t you?’ said Yara.

  ‘They’re stories,’ said Lara, above her sister’s shoulder, ‘he spent all the money on alcohol and traveling around the world. He wasn’t robbed. It never rained Liras on Hamra Street.’

  ‘I don’t believe you,’ said my sister, who sat so close to the edge of the bed that when she spoke the sheer force of her words almost knocked her onto the floor.

  ‘Suit yourself,’ said Yara, ‘I’m telling you the truth. He did not come back permanently until he was an old man.’

  ‘Some say he even stole the money. Him and Abu Talal,’ said Lara. ‘Think about it. How many people actually win the lottery? What are the odds?’

  ‘You’re liars,’ said my sister, ‘both of you. And you’re going to hell because that is where liars belong.’

  ‘You know your mother is going to hell, right?’ scoffed Yara.

  ‘She means that in the best possible way,’ said Lara.

  ‘Of course,’ said Yara.

  ‘No, I don’t,’ I replied, ‘who said?’

  ‘Your mother is going to hell,’ said my sister, which is what I should have said.

  ‘Our mother says so, and everyone agrees,’ said Yara.

  She ignored my sister because she was small and even though we were all sat on the same bed, she could easily be pushed off, and the conversation carried on without her input.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘She’s a Christian,’ Lara whispered, presumably so as not to unintentionally spread Christianity around the room.

  ‘I doubt it,’ I said.

  ‘No it’s true, I swear,’ said Yara, ‘she is a Christian.’

  ‘I know that. I meant I doubt that she would be sent to live in hell.’

  ‘You’re not sent to live in hell,’ said Lara, leaning forward and pushing her fringe back, ‘you have to die to go to hell.’

  ‘Why would anyone want to do that?’ asked my sister.

  ‘That’s a long way away,’ I said, also ignoring my sister’s words.

  ‘That’s what you say now,’ said Yara, ‘but life passes by in the blink of an eye.’

  ‘Who said?’

  ‘My mother.’

  ‘Ferial agrees, don’t you Ferial?’ asked Yara.

  ‘It does,’ said Ferial.

  Ferial was a shy girl who wore glasses and the frizzy, wild hair which so distinguished my sister, but with less character and more poise.

  ‘No, I meant about their mother going to hell.’

  ‘I am not sure about that. I mean, I don’t mean to be rude, but have you asked anyone else apart from your mother about this?’

  ‘It says so in the Koran,’ said Lara.

  She and Yara exchanged brief glances. One of them nodded to the other.

  ‘Shut up. Tell them to shut up,’ said my sister, glaring at me, ‘why haven’t you told them to shut up yet?’

  ‘It says in the Koran that our mother is going to hell?’ I asked.

  ‘Not exactly.’

  ‘It’s implied,’ says the other one.

  My sister jumped up onto the bed, now barefoot, and formed the letter ‘C’ between her thumb and index finger. She swung her hand from Yara to Lara and back again. At first, I thought that she had meant to form a hook with her index finger but had simply forgotten, or failed, to tuck her thumb in. But she hadn’t.

  ‘Whatever you say goes back to you,’ she said, waving the ‘C’ claw in their faces.

  ‘That’s ridiculous,’ said Yara or Lara.

  ‘Yes, look,’ said my sister, illustrating the dynamics of the gesture, ‘It flows like water under my finger then slides out my thumb and back onto you.’

  ‘Shut up, and sit down,’ said Lara or Yara.

  ‘No,’ shouted my sister, attracting the attention of the older cousins, ‘you’re ridiculous and you shut up and your mother is going to hell. That’s how it works.’

  There was audible tension in the room because now that the adults were invoked, they were bound to make an appearance at some point which would not end well for anyone caught in a compromising position in that instant.

  ‘That’s not how it works,’ said Yara, her voice now also raised.

  ‘It says so in the Koran.’

  ‘It does not.’

  ‘Tell your sister to shut up and sit down,’ said Lara.

  They were both standing on the bed now, in their matching bright red shoes. Yara pushed my sister off the bed. And I stood up and pushed Yara off the bed, and then Lara for good measure. I spotted Ferial silently edging herself towards the corner of the bed and gave her a slight shove too. I felt a large hand on my shoulder. I spun around and felt the knuckles of a fist connect with my face and a throbbing below my left eye which is unusual because usually you do not feel the throbbing until after the adrenaline wears off but I did. It was Yara and Lara’s older teenage brother, Omar, who had intervened to put an end to the commotion.

  ‘Didn’t your mother teach you not to hit girls?’ asked Omar.

  I thought about trying a funny retort to do with her being too busy planning her journey to hell, but I could not formulate the sentence fast enough – I could not decide if she was booking accommodation or already packing – and my eye was throbbing, so I just lay on the floor and avoided making eye contact. Which was also what I did when my father burst into his old room to find me sprawled there with my hands pressed against my eye.

  ‘Jesus-Mohammad-Christ,’ said my father.

  He pinched the bridge of his nose then walked out without asking any questions. He muttered something to my sister about putting her sho
es on.

  ‘Still driving that piece of shit?’ shouted my grandfather after him, as we made our way past the same odd collection of twenty or so assorted relatives standing up to bid us goodbye.

  My parents got into an argument on the way back. They argued about my grandfather, then about me and my black eye and my sister, then about the car. The fact that my father had managed to park the car almost ten minutes away from the house, for lack of suitably large parking space, further infuriated my mother.

  Behind our house which was not a house, there was a garden which was not a garden. It was a parking lot reserved for the tenants of the apartment building; and it was my father who had first dubbed it a garden on account of a single tall jasmine tree surrounded by a small plot of soil in an ocean of cement. On Independence Day, as my sister approached her fifth birthday, the children in her nursery school were handed young cedar trees in little pots and told to take them home with them. Upon spotting my sister walk into the house, holding the cedar tree in one hand and my mother’s hand in another, my father scooped her up and carried her to the garden. My mother, my sister and I observed as he dug a small hole in the soil with his hands and planted the cedar tree right by the jasmine one. My mother then scolded my father for giving his daughter false hope. What the children in my sister’s nursery school were not told is that cedar trees are not meant to survive and grow indoors, or anywhere by the coast for that matter, and that the potted plants would soon after proceed to wilt and then die.

  ‘You told the boy he could become an astronaut,’ my father said, dusting the soil off his hands and clothes.

  ‘That is different,’ my mother replied.

  ‘I’m just giving the tree a fighting chance,’ he said, as he rolled down his sleeves.

  For a week afterwards, the highlight of my sister’s day was checking on the cedar tree in the garden on her way back from school. It had not grown an inch but it hadn’t died either. Then one day Madame Hafez, the landlord and fifth-floor neighbour, ripped the plant from the ground and tossed it in the trash can. She was not French but she had insisted upon being called Madame. Her husband Doctor Farhat, who winced every time someone referred to him as Monsieur Hafez, was the old man responsible for planting the jasmine tree in the then parking lot. In the elevator, he crouched down so that his eyes were level with my sister’s and apologised on his absent wife’s behalf. She adjusted her ponytail and nodded.

  In order to park a car in the parking lot with the single Jasmine tree, one had to squeeze one’s car through a narrow passageway which separated the adjacent building from our own. This was not ideal for most of the neighbours even with their German, Asian and French models, but for my father, with his 1988 Oldsmobile, it was impossible. His attempt to force the car through the narrow space between the two buildings is how the first side-view mirror was knocked off. My father continued to pay the obligatory parking fee for a spot which served only to remind him that his car was too big.

  ‘I’ll sell it,’ my father proclaimed, as we made the rest of our way to the house on foot, ‘I’ll charge them extra for the literary entertainment.’

  ‘It’s not about the car,’ my mother said.

  ‘He’s an old man, haneen, he’s not going to change for you or me or anybody.’

  ‘It’s not about him, either.’

  ‘I’m not moving to London to live off your sister’s charity,’ he said, slamming the steel gate to the building shut, ‘we’ve already been through this.’

  ‘Australia, then.’

  ‘God damn Australia,’ he shouted, ‘and the hour in which it was created.’

  A sharp exchange of words in the elevator was soon followed by a sharper exchange of words in the dining room, which in turn was followed by my mother’s angry swipe at the stacks of newspapers on the dining room table. The An-Nahars, Alhayats, Alanwars, Alsafirs and Aldiars along with A History of Arabia, Sometimes I Dance, Echoes of a Western Word, The Druze Revisited, My Beirut Then, etc. flew across the room as my mother stormed out of it. My father knocked the remainder of them onto the floor, flung the door open and left the apartment. My sister and I were no longer in the back seat of the car pretending not to listen.

  For some time afterwards, my sister and I sat in silence. Then she stood up, launched herself towards the newspapers on the floor, and began kicking them, throwing them in the air, leaping, snatching at them as they, now liras, now Yaras, now Laras and now Madame Hafez’s non-French face, fell to the floor again. She did this until she could not bear to stand, then she stretched her body across the floor and I stretched mine alongside hers.

  MOTHER AND FATHER

  As my sister, my mother and I sat around in a circle crammed inside a single bathroom, my father stood over us, cross-armed, listening intently to the sound of bombs going off in the distance. We could measure their proximity, my sister and I, by the intensity of the expression across my father’s face. A cringe meant that it would land somewhere else, on someone else’s house, on someone else’s family. It was when my father looked up that we feared the worst. I could never quite tell whether he would look up expectantly or whether he would do so in order to better hide his facial expression from us. There was also the relatively insignificant fact that when the shelling dragged on for hours, the sensation of fear was inevitably replaced by the unbridled urge to go and shit or pee or excrete desperately unwanted wastes. Whenever a bomb went off somewhere very far away, he would look down at us and smile and ask us about school and deadlines and essays and football and literature and such, mindful of our need to go.

  It was the war of ’67 or ’82 or ’00 or ’06 and Israel and Lebanon were at it again. I, like my father before me and his father before him, was crouched inside the safest room in the house beside my family and hoping to God that no RPG rocket or bomb would land on my home. The last man to hold a gun for war in our family was my great-grandfather Samiir who fought for the French army during the mandate. His medals of honour are a family heirloom, then in possession of my father. Upon winning the war, the French offered my great-grandfather the French passport and nationality, which he accepted. For a brief period of time I was an as yet unborn Frenchman, then Lebanon got its independence and my great grandfather opted to burn the French passport in celebration.

  On a routine night within the walls of the bathroom, my mother looked over at my father and then at me.

  ‘You’re lucky,’ she said, as mothers almost inevitably will, ‘some writers spend their entire lives looking for inspiration. You’re hiding from it in the bathroom.’

  I wanted to shout back, to say that I never wanted to be a writer, to ask whether she was suggesting I stand on the balcony and let inspiration and stray bullets hit me in their stride, to exclaim that there was probably infinitely more inspiration in space than there ever would be in a tiny old bathroom in Beirut. But I didn’t, because when you’re hiding from death, you worry about him overhearing you saying nasty things to your family, and then interfering to stop the brawl.

  ‘I want to go,’ I said to anyone who would listen.

  ‘Go where?’ my mother asked.

  ‘There,’ I said, pointing to the toilet seat.

  ‘Hold it in, you’re a man,’ my father scowled.

  ‘I can’t,’ I said, but I did. I held it in for two hours.

  ‘You can do anything you set your mind to,’ my mother said.

  ‘But I can’t,’ I said, now almost pleadingly. But I did, I held it in for another hour.

  ‘Your little sister isn’t nagging as much as you are,’ my father said.

  Until finally, after five hours, I let go. No man ever remembers the good old days when, as an infant, he would shit himself daily. If he did remember, he would be infinitely more modest.

  ‘Jesus-Mohammad-Christ,’ my father said, looking at my mother in disbelief, ‘your son just shit himself.’

  ‘What have you done?’ my mother asked in a whisper.

  Once the first te
ar rolled down my cheek, there was nothing I could do about the rest.

  ‘I think I’d rather be out there,’ my father said, cringing.

  ‘Leave him alone,’ my sister shouted, clenching her fists.

  ‘It’s alright,’ my mother said softly, wiping the tears from her face and mine, ‘it happens.’

  A flat-footed Arab astronaut is one thing, but a flat-footed Arab astronaut who once shit himself is an entirely different prospect.

  At that moment, my father looked up; both my sister and I ducked in anticipation. It was the closest one yet. We later learned that the bomb had landed on the building adjacent to our own. Our bedroom window had shattered completely and shards of glass could be found on our beds.

  When the shelling stopped my mother took out the broom and began to dust the glass off the beds.

  ‘I just cleaned those windows, you sons of bitches,’ my mother shouted at the top of her voice.

  It was an hour or so before we’d tidied up the house and replaced the glass with scotch tape. I put on my best clothes and followed my mother around the apartment, attempting to make myself useful.

  My sister and I heard repeated banging coming from the halls so we rushed there in time to see my father’s attempt to knock down Monsieur Mermier’s door fail miserably.

  ‘He won’t answer,’ he said, more to himself than to us, ‘I’ve been knocking on his door for the past ten minutes.’

  Monsieur Mermier had been dead for more than an hour. The debris from the adjacent building had rebounded into his living room and there was nothing we could have done about it. The neighbours, all of the neighbours from the first floor to the fifth floor, gathered inside Monsieur Mermier’s apartment, not that any of them had known him very well while he was still alive. Some of them called the ambulance, some of them mopped the floor, some of them picked up the broken shards of wood and glass and placed them in a pile beside the garbage bin, but most of them just stood by the door and cried.