Between Beirut and the Moon

by A. Naji Bakhti

  ‘What?’ asked Basil.

  ‘It’s about the Don,’ she said, pausing for effect. ‘That story the teachers and parents and journalists wanted us to know is not true. He didn’t die of a stroke.’

  ‘Raise your voice,’ came the voice of a pubescent boy at the back.

  The smell of damp socks wafted through the crowd and disappeared once he had lowered his arms. This was not news. We had long since figured out that the Don was not still in Der ElKamar.

  ‘How did he die?’ asked Nadia.

  ‘He died of suicide,’ whispered Serene, whose thick and full eyebrows moved to the rhythm of her speech.

  ‘Who?’ shouted a tall girl behind me.

  She smelled of aluminium foil and her mother’s perfume.

  ‘The Don,’ shouted damp socks.

  ‘You mean he killed himself,’ said Estelle.

  ‘Yes,’ said Serene, now holding my gaze. ‘He jumped off the rooftop of his building in Rawche.’

  ‘Not the Rawche Rock?’ asked damp socks.

  ‘It’s possible.’

  The rusty steel fence which surrounded the school was chest high. A security guard whose name everyone knew but had forgotten patrolled the perimeter of the fence. He had a deep voice which he often used to scare us away from the fence or to hold long, and audible, rants about the necessity of fences.

  ‘Nonsense,’ shouted a Mohammad sitting on the green bench to Serene’s left. There was always one or two within earshot.

  ‘How do you know this?’ I asked.

  ‘The neighbours,’ she said, ‘but you can’t tell anyone.’

  ‘We won’t,’ said Basil.

  *

  ‘Did you know that Don Amin jumped off a rooftop?’ I asked my father, as he sat at the dinner table scribbling on a blank piece of paper.

  My mother was out visiting Grandmother Mary’s grave. At first, it was every other weekend. Then it was once a month. Then it was on Mother’s Day. Then it was every other Mother’s Day.

  ‘I’m writing an article about him now,’ he said, without looking up. ‘It wasn’t a rooftop. It was the Rawche Rock.’

  ‘You could’ve told me,’ I said, standing behind him.

  ‘Why? Do you have a monopoly on dead people?’

  ‘No, but it would’ve been nice to know.’

  ‘Nice to know that your gym teacher committed suicide?’ he asked, holding his pen still for a moment.

  ‘Yes,’ I said, refusing to back down.

  ‘I’ll tell you when the next one jumps off a building or a rock,’ said my father, having resumed writing. ‘Don’t tell your sister.’

  I told my sister.

  ‘Is it true?’ asked my sister, tugging at my father’s shirt.

  ‘That what?’

  ‘That he killed himself.’

  ‘Who killed himself?’ asked my father, postponing the inevitable.

  ‘Don Amin.’

  ‘Who said he killed himself?’

  ‘Adam told me.’

  ‘What are you deaf?’ asked my father, putting his pen down and turning to look at me. ‘Or just an ass?’

  ‘Don’t call him deaf,’ said my sister.

  ‘I’ll call him whatever I want to call him. He’s my son,’ said my father, flicking through the papers in front of him, ‘and you’re my daughter. Don’t tell me what I can and cannot do.’

  Your children are not yours. They are the sons and daughters of life’s longing for itself. Gibran Khalil Gibran said something like that. I knew that quote by heart at the time. Mr Malik, the Arabic teacher, had drilled it into our heads. And I would’ve said it. Except Gibran seemed wasted on my father.

  ‘What are you trying to protect her from?’ I asked my father, standing to his right with my sister’s head barely visible above the dinner table from the other side.

  ‘I don’t have to tell you.’

  ‘A man was blown to pieces next door. You think it will terrify her to find out that her gym teacher threw himself off the balcony?’

  ‘We live in a country where people die in a variety of ways,’ he said, scratching his chin with the tip of the pen, ‘what would you have me do about it?’

  ‘Why did he do it?’ I asked, after a moment of silence.

  I had believed in the Don in the same way that he had believed in my camel ride to the moon. It diminished me to know that his words would forever have to stand alone without the man who had uttered them. It was a sentiment which, by reading his article, I found my father shared. Or maybe it was one which I had arrived to after reading my father’s article.

  ‘He was too busy throwing himself off the rock to tell me,’ said my father, crossing a line out.

  ‘Why did he do it?’ asked my sister, raising her right hand in the air and moving her wrist in such a way that it appeared she was attempting to change the light bulb. ‘It’s stupid. He’s a stupid man. He throws his life away. And poor Monsieur Mermier dies trying to stay alive.’

  My sister narrowed her eyes and grew a few centimetres. My father looked at me as if to confirm that the minor growth spurt was not some optical illusion performed by a little girl; then he turned his head towards her.

  As she changed the light bulb, my sister stomped her right foot, each time edging her little body closer to my father’s. There was my father sitting at the dining room table with his pen in his hand writing an article about a deceased man, and there was my sister doing the traditional Lebanese Dabke. She danced and stomped her feet and twirled her wrist until her little chest pressed against my father’s elbow.

  ‘It’s not for you to judge the dead, Fara,’ said my father, placing his hands under her armpits and lifting her onto his lap.

  ‘Are you going to mention it in the article?’ I asked.

  I meant my Camel ride to the moon.

  ‘Why would I do that?’ asked my father. ‘It doesn’t speak to the essence of the man.’

  A smile flickered across my father’s face as he said this. Then, with one hand around my sister, he added, or removed, or modified a line in his article, and I knew then not to ask any more questions.

  The official cause of death was a stroke. Don Amin died of a stroke at his home, in his armchair, with his silver whistle hanging around his neck.

  In his article about the Don, my father wrote that ‘the words of a dead man echo throughout space because they have lost their source, because they are homeless, orphans and widowers all at once’ and that ‘the great among us leave that empty space behind them which makes their words echo louder’. He never mentioned the actual words themselves except to say that the Don was capable of bestowing a ‘well done’ upon those who had done well.

  In my room, I told my sister about the day I beat up Mohammad, the sectarian. I told her about Ms Iman.

  ‘What do you want to be when you grow up?’

  I told her about the pretend whipping I received afterwards.

  ‘But it seemed so real. I was outside listening,’ said my sister, eyebrows raised.

  ‘It wasn’t.’

  I went into my father’s room, searched for the black leather belt and dragged it behind me into my room. My sister jumped, and I lashed against the bedsheets either side of her.

  Every time she landed on the bed she would leap higher and laugh louder.

  ‘Again!’ she shouted, inciting me to lash the bedsheets harder.

  There was a moment when she was so high up in the air that I was sure she would refuse to come down.

  ‘Come down, darling,’ my mother would say.

  ‘Come down, Fara,’ my father would say.

  ‘Come down, you indiscriminate lump of mass,’ gravity would say.

  ‘No,’ she would reply, ponytails rising, ‘not until you apologise.’

  We did this for some time, I lashed and she laughed and leapt in the air and her ponytails bounced and twirled, until I landed one of my lashes on her left arm. My sister then clutched her left arm in midair causing her to l
ose balance and land with her head against the edge of the bed.

  My father burst into the room still clutching his pen. He knocked the belt out of my hand, picked up my sister and lifted her over his shoulder.

  ‘What’s wrong with you?’ asked my father, holding my unconscious sister and kicking the belt under the bed.

  I sat in the bright white waiting room at the hospital. I watched as my mother rushed through the door and into the emergency room. I could see my father pacing and angrily gesturing in my direction. I could see my mother grab his wrist and push it downward. I could see my mother kissing my sister and placing her arms around her small body. I could see my mother walk in my direction, crouch beside me and tuck her skirt under her legs.

  ‘I know you were just playing,’ she said, and I felt my eyes burn and the room blur.

  I was six when they brought my sister home from the hospital. My father said, ‘She’s your responsibility, Adam’, then he held her two small hands together in his and made her clap.

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘Your sister is fine.’

  ‘Yes.’

  She was speaking to me as if I were half my age but I didn’t mind. My father stood cross-armed with his back to us, conversing with the doctor and sharing an anecdote or two. I walked past my mother and into the emergency room where my father was.

  ‘It was an accident,’ I shouted, standing close behind him.

  ‘Jesus-Mohammad-Christ,’ said Father, turning around with force. His elbow smacked against my eyebrow as he did so and warm blood trickled down my eye.

  I did not feel the cut on my eyebrow and had I sustained it in the playground, I probably would have ignored it and kept playing. My mother held my head in her arms as the doctor applied Fucidin on my eyebrow. My sister, who had cried in intervals up to that point, stopped to observe. And a cluster of doctors came in anticipating a brawl of some sort which did not happen. When I blinked tears ran down my cheek, so I stopped blinking.

  ‘When I die, cry over my dead body,’ said my father. It was a common enough Lebanese expression but it seemed personal under the circumstances.

  ‘Two kids in one day, Najjar,’ said the doctor, as he applied Fucidin to my eyebrow. ‘That’s not very good parenting, even for a Lebanese father.’

  YURI GAGARIN

  A couple of days later my sister returned from school with her cast signed. She had fractured her wrist too but it took the doctors a while to realise this, as she was crying and would not properly communicate with them. Most of her classmates wrote ‘get well soon’ or ‘you rock’ or ‘ponytail madness’, in English, with a smiley face or heart and a signature underneath. Except for this one kid who wrote the digits ‘112’ and signed it as ‘the police’. This my father seemed to find more outwardly funny than the best episodes of Basmeet ElWatan.

  ‘Jesus-Mohammad-Christ,’ he gasped, between laughs, ‘Jesus-Mohammad-Christ.’

  My mother did not find this at all amusing and she pressed my sister for details of the boy, or girl, who had done this, as we all sat around the TV set.

  ‘What’s his name?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘What did he look like?’

  ‘I don’t remember.’

  ‘You do. What did he look like?’

  My sister held off for longer than I expected. Then she came clean and told my mother that it wasn’t a kid at all who had signed her cast but her English teacher, Mr David Aston. Mr Aston was a fifty-something Englishman from Southampton with hair parted to the right and eyebrows that stubbornly refused to yield to either side. He would speak very slowly and had come to Beirut in order to reignite his love life or inspire young Lebanese students, or both. He and Don Amin did not get along. The Don called him Mr Bean, which as far as the Don’s nicknames go, was not particularly his best. Mr Aston did look a bit like Rowan Atkinson, with his long, lanky arms and gangly figure, but it wouldn’t have made a difference to the Don if he were round and short. To the Don, every Englishman was Mr Bean and every couple of Americans were Dumb and Dumber.

  ‘It is funny, a bit, that you think policemen even care about kids getting punished,’ said my father, now standing in front of Mr Aston’s class, flanked by my mother, my sister and myself and addressing the Englishman.

  ‘I’m not sure what you’re talking about,’ said Mr Aston. ‘If you’re referring to the digits on your daughter’s cast, then I think we should go inside.’

  We all followed Mr Aston inside the classroom and my sister sat in her assigned seat.

  ‘You don’t have to sit there now,’ said my father.

  My sister looked at Mr Aston and he nodded.

  ‘This is not London,’ said my father. He had the habit of referring to the whole of Great Britain as London, which got worse with age. Much later, he would ask me what the weather was like in London while I was making my way across Grafton Street in Dublin. This was not a habit that was exclusive to my father.

  ‘I am well aware of that,’ said the Englishman, adjusting his necktie. ‘Please take a seat.’ It was a thin, red wool tie that looked as if it had been snipped at the end.

  Mr Malik, the Arabic teacher, paused for a moment by the door on his way from class to his office. My father almost seemed to forget the Englishman and focused his eyes solely on the round, limping figure by the doorway. My mother offered Mr Malik a brief wave and a fleeting smile. Her smile was further emphasised by her dimples, which gave the impression of quotation marks on either side of her face. Far from making the smile itself less sincere as quotation marks sometimes do, they made it loud, almost like a smile which you could hear, one with a voice and intonation. Mr Malik nodded back and limped on.

  ‘We’ll stand,’ said my father, slightly taken aback by the sudden appearance of the Arabic teacher, as my mother sat down.

  In hindsight, it was obvious that some complicated history existed between my father, my mother and Mr Malik. Though back then I simply assumed, that like me and my classmates, my father had found the sight of the man to be strikingly grotesque.

  ‘I’m not accusing anyone of anything, Mr Najjar.’

  ‘You think I beat my wife and children,’ said my father, tearing his eyes away from the now empty doorway.

  ‘Nobody said anything about Mrs. Najjar.’

  ‘My children then.’

  ‘I didn’t say that,’ said Mr Aston, breathing in. ‘It might be best for the children to wait outside.’

  ‘They stay. Why did you write the police’s number on her cast then?’

  ‘My concern,’ said Mr Aston, sneaking a glance at my eyebrow, ‘is for my students’ well-being.’

  ‘Her well-being is well,’ said my father, ‘end of story.’ He only ended stories early when speaking in English.

  ‘Mr Aston, you seem to have misread the situation,’ said my mother, looking calmly at the man, ‘my husband does not beat up the children. And even if he did, the police wouldn’t do anything about it.’

  ‘I’m sure that is the case. I won’t pretend to know more about Lebanon than the Lebanese.’

  ‘You’re English, Mr Aston, aren’t you?’

  ‘Yes, I am,’ he said, pleased to be moving away from the subject.

  ‘Then why haven’t you gone through the standard procedures for a case like this?’

  ‘Truth be told, I have,’ said Mr Aston, smiling for the first time. ‘Ms Iman kept saying she’d call you in, but she never did.’

  My father ran the palm of his hand across his face.

  ‘I’ll take it from here,’ said Ms Iman, as Mr Aston left her office and shut the door behind him.

  ‘He seems like a good man, if a bit odd,’ said my mother, adjusting her position in the black leather armchair.

  My sister and I sat in the centre, with my father to my left and my mother at the other end. The office had remained as it had been, down to the patterns on the Persian carpets, except for a new water cooler and a calendar in the shape of a ced
ar tree behind Ms Iman’s desk which read: ‘Courtesy of Plaza Pharmacy.’

  ‘He was a pastor before he decided to do this.’

  ‘I can understand your hesitation in hiring him,’ said my father, leaning back.

  I smiled at Ms Iman. I did not mind being in her office when I was not on trial for blasphemy or thuggery. She smiled back. I expected to be offered a soft drink or orange juice. I was not.

  ‘My condolences for the death of Don Amin. We all miss him here. I know you two were close,’ said Ms Iman, ignoring my father’s remarks, ‘I read your article in An-Nahar.’

  ‘Yes,’ said my father, scratching his moustache, ‘thank you.’

  ‘The two of them look like they’ve been in a car accident,’ said Ms Iman, pointing to my sister’s state and my eyebrow.

  ‘We don’t own a car anymore,’ said my sister.

  ‘The Israelis,’ I said, looking from my mother to my father and back again.

  ‘The truth is my son and daughter were playing in the bedroom. He unintentionally lashed the belt at her arm and she hit her head against the edge of the bed. Then my husband accidently elbowed him in the face, around the eyebrow,’ said my mother.

  ‘Can I have some water?’ I asked.

  ‘Do you still want to be an astronaut?’ asked Ms Iman, smiling again and looking at me through her eyeglasses. She handed me a cold cup of water. Ms Iman looked the same, except now she had developed more lines around her eyes and her cheekbones had become pronounced. This was a further attempt to be taken more seriously by her male colleagues.

  ‘Yes,’ I nodded.

  She paused for a long second, and in that moment I heard her say: ‘And do you think fathers of astronauts elbow them in the face?’

  ‘How are you getting on in physics and chemistry?’

  I shrugged and placed my fingers over my eyebrow. I wasn’t getting on at all in physics and chemistry. Our teacher, Mr Abu Alam, did not have a high opinion of Basil or myself.

  ‘Do you understand, you two?’ he would ask.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You understand the soles of my highlander flip-flops. That’s what you understand.’