Between Beirut and the Moon

by A. Naji Bakhti

  ‘He was so young,’ one large woman said, in between sobs.

  ‘Not that young,’ my sister interjected, to the sound of one or two chuckles and a few odd stares.

  ‘Young enough,’ the large woman replied.

  ‘Young enough for what?’ my sister asked, only to be ignored.

  ‘Was he Muslim or Christian?’ enquired the large woman.

  ‘He was French Chafeeka, what do you think?’ said a much shorter and stouter woman.

  My father grabbed me by the arm and pulled me to the kitchen. He shut the door behind us and locked it. For a moment I thought he was about to take out his black leather belt and lecture me on the importance of restraint and maintaining one’s composure. But he didn’t. He took out his bottle of Arak and poured us a shot each.

  ‘To Monsieur Mermier,’ he said, raising his glass.

  Many years later, long after I’d left Lebanon to pursue a higher education in London, my father would write a heartfelt article in An-Nahar newspaper. It would be his final article before he retired.

  ‘I curse the country,’ he would write, ‘I curse the country that bid our children farewell with a smile across its face and told them to never return. I curse the country that presented our children with two alternatives: death or immigration and instructed them to pick between the two. I curse the country that forced its parents to send their children to outer space, or worse Europe, and wave silently from afar. I curse the country that gave our children water but no future, soil but no belief, light but no hope. I curse the country that stripped our children of their parents, and us of them. I curse the country that made fools of us all and led us to believe that we would grow old watching our sons and daughters rise to greater heights amongst their fellow countrymen. I curse the country that robbed me of my afternoon Arak with my son. I curse the country that deprived me of the sight of his wispy beard slowly maturing into one which resembles my own. I curse the country that resigned my wife and I to that comfortable couch in the living room, staring past broken shards of glass into the empty void that is tomorrow. I curse the country, mother and father.’

  He passed away not long after that but by then my father had suffered through the untimely demise of his upstart publishing house, a severe, unwarranted beating at the hands of militiamen, and the sudden gratuitous disappearance of a cat called Ninnette.

  THE MACARENA

  There is an article which my father wrote several years before I was born and which my mother kept hidden away from the dust in her table of drawers. She showed it to me as soon as she believed I was capable of appreciating it. Every so often I would forget about it, and my mother would produce it again; a little older, a little more fragile, but still readable. In it, my father claims that he only wants three things out of life: a book to carry his name, a tree to carry his seed, and a child to carry him when he can no longer carry himself.

  A car never came into it.

  We awoke the morning after Monsieur Mermier’s death to find the Oldsmobile riddled with bullets and littered with broken glass and heavily punctured books and newspapers. My father stood before it scratching his ear, first with his thumbnail then with the car keys, and smiling. That was the closest Barney would ever get to a eulogy; my mother shaking her head and lighting cigarettes, my sister and I inspecting the bullet holes and my father scratching his ear.

  As the tow truck was too large to squeeze into an already narrow street lined with well-washed cars on either side, Barney stayed. It soon became a landmark, as well as an intermittent home for a brown street cat with a collar, which my father named Ninnette after the porter’s wife. Ninnette was a dark-haired, brown-eyed slender woman who wore a gold necklace around her neck and several gold bracelets around her wrist. She smiled back at anyone who did not ignore her.

  Often I would find my father bent over in conversation with Ninnette, offering the cat a lick of his Cadbury Fruit and Nut bar, which he always kept hidden away in his coat pocket or in his back pocket if he happened not to be wearing a coat. Or else I would stumble upon leftovers from my mother’s delicious stuffed zuchinni and vine leaves dish in the most curious of places such as underneath Dr. Farhat’s blue Toyota or on top of the backup electric generator where she liked to perch herself during the cold winter months, and of course inside the Oldsmobile itself.

  Such was the extent of the Oldsmobile’s reputation, that residents of the same street would inform the Shawarma deliveryman, and other visitors, that they lived two buildings down from the old, white American. My sister was of the opinion that the street was not too far off being called the White American. It was true that the original, ‘Sadat’, so called after a former Egyptian president who briefly restored peace under dubious circumstances in the post Gamal Abdel Nasser era only to be assassinated by the Israelis or the Egyptians or God’s will, was not a particularly popular name.

  The porter, Saeed, who was also Egyptian and who would now and again beat both his sons and their mother, made a habit out of ringing the doorbell early in the morning, newspaper in hand, to ask my father whether today was the day that the White American would disappear forever. Saeed believed that he could turn a profit by getting my father to sell him the White American for cheap.

  ‘Any news?’ my father would ask, taking the An-Nahar Daily from Saeed’s hands and sifting through it.

  ‘Madame Farhat is complaining that the car hasn’t been washed in a while,’ said Saeed one morning in midweek, as my sister and I prepared for school.

  ‘Then wash it,’ my father replied, still going through the contents of the paper.

  ‘But there are no windows and too many holes.’

  ‘Shouldn’t that make it easier?’

  ‘Yes, Basha.’

  ‘Basha’ is an Ottoman term which Saeed reserved for any man who was not a porter. It means ‘lord’.

  ‘Anyone moving into that apartment?’ my father asked, nudging his head in the direction of Monsieur Mermier’s old home, without raising it to meet Saeed’s eyes.

  ‘Monsieur Mermier’s belongings are still in there.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I found this book in your American car,’ said Saeed, scratching his chin and producing a tattered book from under his armpit, ‘something about goats and reincarnation, it is a bit damp, but still readable.’

  ‘Calves, not goats,’ my father corrected. ‘It is yours. Have it.’

  In his early forties, my father developed an interest in the Druze, a peculiar religious minority which exist only in the mountains of Syria and Lebanon. The car, more than our home, contained remnants of that period of time when, to my father only, the Druze were all the rage. This fascination with the Druze seeped into the now increasingly enthralled porter who would seize every opportunity to learn more about them via the discarded literature of the White American. No one knew very much about the Druze and, it was said, the Druze did not know very much about themselves except that they believed in reincarnation and that they might learn more about their religion in the next life. Those who wrote books about the Druze devoted the vast majority of their books to dispelling myths about the Druze believers and their beliefs. The Druze Story, for instance, was written by a scholar, Elias Jabra, who had limited knowledge on the matter beyond what his brother had told him. The scholar’s brother had shot and temporarily killed several members of the Druze community in the War of the Mountain between the Christians and the Druze in the eighties.

  One such myth was that the Druze did not eat spinach because a holy calf once slipped on a pile of spinach leaves and broke its neck. Jabra had this to say on the subject: ‘Most Druze would tell you that the slip is not the reason they refrained from eating spinach and that calves or goats for that matter are, as far as they know, not particularly holy. Some of them would even tell you that they do eat spinach, albeit in the same manner that a Hindu would eat beef, or a Muslim eat pork.’

  A Druze classmate of mine, Basil – a rarity amongst the mos
tly Muslim and Christian students – would ask his mother to pack spinach and rice in his lunchbox every day, and every day his mother would. This went on for a month with Basil eating spinach and rice during the break and receiving a dirty look or two in the process. Until, finally, everyone proclaimed Basil a Druze atheist who did not believe in the holy goat.

  During the lunar month of Ramadan, while my Muslim classmates fasted, Basil and I ate. While they thirsted, we drank. The Christians ate and drank too, of course. But they did not chew too loudly, nor burp, nor lick their fingers, nor soak their lips in burger sauce or mayonnaise, only their teeth, nor raise their heads to knock back a cold can of Pepsi on a hot sunny afternoon.

  When the history teacher asked why Basil and I were not fasting, I said I was a Christian and Basil said he was a Druze. Ms Bache was a brunette who had dyed her hair blonde because it was turning white. Crow’s feet had formed around her eyes which her choice of large, round glasses only served to highlight. She also wore a scarf around her neck at all times. No one knew what exactly was wrong with her neck.

  ‘Are the Druze not supposed to fast?’ asked Ms Bache in class.

  Basil pushed out his lower lip and scratched his eyebrow in reply.

  That month, Basil and I were invited to our first Iftar, the ceremonial stuffing of one’s face at sunset to make up for all the hours of the day spent thinking about hot food and not eating it. It was another Mohammad who had invited us, a short white boy with freckles. His appearance gave the distinct impression that he was European, despite the fact that no one in his family had ventured outside of Lebanon except for his father’s brief stint in England. Both his mother and father were very much olive-skinned and did not have a single freckle between them. As adoption is forbidden in Islam, everyone at school ruled this out immediately. They, instead, decided that Mohammad’s grandmother was raped by a Crusader, a phrase which was often repeated to Mohammad whenever the occasion called for it. Mohammad’s family had originated from the south, an area which was historically heavily populated with Crusaders. His insistence upon not inviting anyone who had claimed his grandmother was the rape-victim of a Crusader to Iftar reduced his guest list to three Muslims, a half-Christian and a Druze.

  I told my parents that I was going to fast on the morning of the Iftar. My father had not yet received his newspaper from Saeed and was sat on the comfortable couch in the living room holding a book entitled The Druze Revisited. On one of the bookshelves behind my father, squeezed in between Emily Nasrallah’s Birds of September and Youssef Saleme’s Yassin Had This to Say, rested a framed photograph of him wearing his cap and gown and moustache. In the photograph my father is not smiling. A wrinkle parts his forehead and a dimple parts his chin. The photograph was the only one on display in the house. It was coloured and my father’s tie was red.

  Though my sister was very fond of this photograph, she wasn’t allowed to pick it off the shelf because she was too young to carry glass around the house. I had memorised the titles of the two books either side of the photograph as I was often the one to return it to its rightful place after my sister had left her fingerprints all over the glass. When my mother caught on to this, she moved the photograph up a couple of shelves.

  ‘I liked it better when you wanted to go to the moon,’ said my father, flipping the page.

  ‘I still do,’ I said, in an attempt to sound defiant.

  ‘Adam, I have no doubt that you can do anything you set your mind to,’ my mother said as she tied my sister’s shoelaces, ‘but I’m making stuffed zucchini for lunch today.’

  ‘Can I fast too?’ asked my sister, looking up at my mother, who in turn glared at my father, who in turn glared at me.

  ‘No,’ my mother replied.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘We’ll discuss this again when you learn how to tie your own shoelaces.’

  ‘Why does he get to fast?’ asked my sister, pointing her small finger at me.

  ‘He won’t last ‘til lunchtime,’ said my father, now momentarily less interested in The Druze Revisited.

  ‘Don’t discourage him,’ my mother said, furrowing her eyebrows.

  The doorbell rang and my father opened the door to find Saeed holding the newspaper in one hand and a brown cat in the other.

  ‘Any news?’ my father asked, taking the An-Nahar Daily from Saeed’s hands and sifting through it.

  ‘I found this in your car, Basha,’ he said, holding out the cat.

  Ninnette purred possibly in anticipation of a slightly larger plate of stuffed zucchini and vine leaves than she was accustomed to, owing to the fact that I was still determined to fast.

  ‘Take it back.’

  ‘Of course, anything else?’

  ‘Stop beating your wife.’

  ‘Why, has she said anything?’

  ‘She doesn’t have to,’ said my father, now reading through his own article.

  ‘I’ll ask her to keep her voice down.’

  My mother insisted upon having a family meal around the dining room table in the afternoon, when my sister and I had arrived from school. This meant that my father and I had to clear the table of the newspapers which had once again found their way onto it. It also meant that my father had to carry one of the foldable balcony chairs into the dining room, as one of the original four dining room chairs had long since lost a leg. He then adjusted the TV set so that he could both see and hear Basmet Elwatan from the dining room. The smell of stuffed zucchini had filled the room. After a short-lived argument between my sister and my father over who got to sit at the head of the table, we eventually found a place for her on my father’s lap. She soon tired of this and resigned herself to the empty seat to his right.

  Though my mother remarked that I did not have to sit with them this time, as I was fasting, she insisted that this was how it was going to be from now on. It wasn’t. The next time we would sit together around the dining room table would be Christmas, and the next time after that would be the following Christmas.

  Over lunch, my father told us the story of his mother and how she would starve them during Ramadan.

  ‘I begged her. I bargained. I said, “I’ll only have one olive and a piece of flatbread, that’s it.” She made me fast for an additional hour, just for that.’

  Then he asked me if I thought astronauts fasted on their way to the moon. And I said, I don’t know. And my mother said, drop it. And my father said, they probably don’t. And I said, why not. And my father said, because the sun doesn’t set in space. And my mother said lunch was over. And my father said he wasn’t done. And my mother told him to take out the folding chair to the balcony. And my father kicked the folding chair shut with his heel as he stood up, grabbed it with his right hand, chewed on his last bite of stuffed zucchini and launched the chair out of the balcony and into the air.

  The chair hung for a moment, allowing my mother, my sister and I enough time to rush to the balcony and observe it in full flight. It landed on the roof of one of the few remaining Ottoman houses in Beirut, opposite our own building. Madame Hafez owned that house too, but it was inhabited by the grandson of one of the men who had fought for independence from the French. He was an old man who had refused to pay rent for some time. Madame Hafez/Farhat had decided to wait for him to die rather than enter into a battle about neglected rent payments.

  ‘I’m proud of you,’ said my mother as she dropped me off at Mohammad’s place.

  She said the incident with the flying foldable chair was not about me. She said it was because my father was afraid of confronting the possibility of something.

  I reclined against the steel gate to Mohammad’s building. Only a few patches of green remained to indicate that there had ever been any effort made to paint the rusted bars of metal which now guarded the entrance to the otherwise polished building.

  ‘The possibility of what?’ I asked.

  Basil and the Muslims were already there, sitting around the dining room table. When the sun finally
set, we ate pizza, from Pizza Hut. Basil told us he was glad the goat hadn’t slipped on pizza. Mohammad’s mother let out a high-pitched giggle and asked if he would like more. And I laughed.

  Mohammad’s mother laid out the prayer mats for us while we were eating and we all stepped onto them as soon as we were done. I imitated the motions: hands on stomach, hands to ears, knees on floor, head against floor and mumbled the words to ‘Our Father Which Art in Heaven’. My maternal grandmother, Teta Mary, had taught me it. I was afraid to sleep in the dark and glad to have her somewhat coarse voice by my bedside, despite the fact that her sporadic attempts to unofficially baptise my sister and I with ‘Holy Water’ in my parents’ absence often included a violent chase and generally ended in tears. Hers, not ours.

  When my grandfather Nabil fell ill, many years ago, my grandmother made a pact with God. She promised that if he let her husband live for a few more years she would take a cab to Mount Harissa, climb, barefoot, up the long winding stairs leading to the holy statue of Virgin Mary, kneel before it, recite ‘Our Father Which Art in Heaven’ and kiss it. Having witnessed both her father and step father die of heart attacks, Teta Mary was determined not to let her husband go the same way. When my grandfather recovered from his heart attack my grandmother left him at the hospital, took a cab to Mount Harissa, climbed, barefoot, up the long winding stairs leading to the holy statue of Virgin Mary, knelt before it, put out her cigarette and kissed it. Then she lit another cigarette and recited the words to ‘Our Father Which Art in Heaven’.

  Basil stood on the prayer mat, hands in his pockets, while the rest of us knelt to the floor. For a one idle second, we were praying to the spinach-eating, holy-goat-denying, Druze boy from the mountains. While the rest of the boys pressed their pious foreheads against the floor, Basil turned around so that he now towered over his lesser classmates. He extended his arms to the side like that Christ the Redeemer statue except with the palms facing downwards. Mohammad’s mother, who stood behind the newly minted Druze deity, blinked but did not say a word. She, Basil and I shared one private moment of unabashed blasphemy in a room full of velvet fabric and young boys in pursuit of higher spiritual ends. Then he decided that divinity was not for him, and found a place for himself on the velvet couch.