Between Beirut and the Moon

by A. Naji Bakhti

  I am an Arab

  And my identity card number is fifty thousand

  I have eight children

  And the ninth will come after a summer

  Will you be angry?

  …I have a name without a title

  Patient in a country

  Where people are enraged

  My roots

  Were entrenched before the birth of time

  And before the opening of the eras

  Before the pines, and the olive trees

  And before the grass grew…

  …Write down!

  I am an Arab

  You have stolen the orchards of my ancestors

  And the land which I cultivated

  Along with my children

  And you left nothing for us

  Except for these rocks…’

  Beside that hung what appeared to be a red, spinning swastika. This was not Hitler’s; it was the Syrian Social Nationalist Party’s. It looked like a disorientated swastika with an identity crisis. It was the emblem of one of the few remaining secular parties in Lebanon, except it did not believe in Lebanon. Its entire dubious existence was based on the idea that Lebanon is a colonial fabrication and that modern day Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Palestine and Cyprus are linked historically and geographically as one. This region was referred to as the fertile crescent. The SSNP eventually allied themselves with Hezbollah which muddled their cause further. The juxtaposition of both the poem and the emblem made little sense to the informed observer. At the time, I accepted the board as it was, ignorant of the fact that the SSNP had rejected Arab Nationalism, much like it had rejected the notion of an independent Lebanon.

  ‘What’s your problem, you two?’ asked Mr Malik.

  ‘You want to castrate the poets, sir,’ said Basil, ‘it’s unfair.’

  ‘What does that have to do with your accusation, Abu Mekhi?’

  ‘I’m saying, sir, that the poets were human. They played, they laughed, they drank,’ said Basil, ‘and they touched children.’

  I nudged Basil in the ribs. He did not acknowledge it.

  ‘Are you going to stop this nonsense you two are spreading about me or am I going to have to show you what it means to be a paedophile?’ said Mr Malik, slamming his significant fist against the desk.

  ‘Yes, sir,’ I said. Basil nodded.

  The chair creaked underneath the weight of the paedophile.

  ‘Tell your father I read that article about the Don in An-Nahar,’ said Mr Malik, standing up so that the poem and the swastika were hidden behind him. ‘Tell him it is dire shit.’

  The Don referred to him as ‘Comrade’, in his presence, on account of the fact that they were both members of the SSNP, and ‘bastard’, in his absence, on account of the fact that they disagreed about the direction in which it was moving. The Comrade gave us two weeks of detention.

  ‘I will, sir,’ I said, as Basil and I stood up to leave.

  ‘Not you, Abu Mekhi,’ said Mr Malik. ‘You can leave, Najjar.’

  As I made my way out of the doorway, Mr Malik cleared his throat.

  ‘How is your mother doing, Najjar?’ he asked.

  ‘Alright, sir.’

  ‘Give her my best.’

  ‘I will,’ I said. But I didn’t.

  ‘And shit article, don’t forget that.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Dire shit.’

  ‘Yes, sir. Dire shit, sir.’

  Minutes later, Basil appeared by the classroom door. Ms Katerina gave him permission to come in. He placed his hand on his buttocks and pretended to limp all the way to his seat. Estelle laughed and was joined by several others in class. Ms Katrina put her fingers to her lips, then turned around and began to erase the shapes on the board. I asked him why Mr Malik had told him to stay and he flicked his wrist, mimicking the movement involved in throwing something behind one’s back; as if to say it was already in the past.

  Estelle and I walked home together. I had told my mother that our house was not as far as she made it out to seem. I told Estelle we could walk it easily. On the way, she told me that she was going to be alone for the weekend. Estelle’s home remained a mystery to me. She had never invited me in and I had never asked to be invited. The memory of shards of glass and rubble in the aftermath of Monsieur Mermier’s death was still fresh. I imagined that she would skip past them every evening on her way to the bedroom, that she would get her socks caught in a splinter of wood or step on a piece of glass and scream, ‘Maman!’

  ‘She’s a busy woman. Always in conferences. But I’m proud of her,’ she said.

  ‘I’m proud of my mother too,’ I said.

  ‘She’s in a conference now. In Marseilles.’

  ‘And what did your father do? Before he left,’ I asked.

  ‘Nothing. What do dark, brooding Lebanese men do?’

  I looked at Estelle. She was whitest in the sun. Her hair glowed. I looked at the hair on her arMs She did not shave or wax them, but they were light and blond.

  ‘We apply excessive amounts of gel to our hair until it falls off,’ I said.

  She nodded and smiled wistfully.

  We stood outside the door of her apartment. It was locked. Estelle couldn’t find her key, she banged against Monsieur Mermier’s old door. I invited her into my house. My mother was picking up my sister and my father sat on the couch reading a newspaper. Estelle thanked my father for allowing her to wait inside for her mother.

  ‘When’s she arriving, your mother?’

  ‘Not until Thursday.’

  ‘Why don’t you jump from our balcony to yours?’

  Estelle looked at me.

  ‘You’re right,’ said my father, ‘he should jump.’

  Estelle, my father and I stood on the balcony. The idea was that I would leap from our balcony to Estelle’s, walk in, unlock the door from the inside and let her in. We heard the zucchini man.

  ‘That’s unusual,’ said my father, ‘he doesn’t normally show up on weekdays.’

  ‘I really appreciate it,’ said Estelle, smiling.

  My father removed his Parker pen from his shirt pocket and drew out the details on a newspaper. It was the sports page. I was to step on the first pile of books, then the second, presumably higher, pile of books and leap from that onto the next balcony. The two balconies were not far apart and an actual leap was unnecessary. My father insisted.

  I ran up the first time and slipped on Echo of Lost Words. I ran up the second time and slipped on Daily Matters which No One Cares About. I started to run up the third time and my mother walked out onto the balcony, holding my sister’s hand. My father explained the plan.

  ‘Why don’t you jump?’ asked my mother.

  ‘I’m an old man,’ said my father.

  ‘I can jump,’ my sister volunteered, only to be ignored again.

  ‘If anyone should be jumping, it should be me,’ said Estelle.

  ‘No,’ said my mother, ‘your parents – mother – isn’t here. We cannot give you permission to do something like that.’

  I looked at my mother, my father, my sister and Estelle, and I ran up for the fourth time. I stepped on Rainbows in the Desert then Contemporary Ink and landed on Estelle’s balcony.

  ‘Are you alright?’ asked my mother.

  ‘Did you break a leg?’ asked my father.

  I stood up and dusted off my cargo shorts. I had been forced into a roll on the ground to lessen the impact of the landing. My first instinct was to land on my knee with one arm on the other knee, like superheroes often do, or like footballers pose for pictures. Somewhere in midair common sense kicked in and I allowed myself to roll.

  I climbed into Estelle’s bedroom from the window. There was not a single shade of pink to be found. The room was neutral. It looked like a hotel room, and I slowed my walk. I wasn’t intruding on someone’s private space. I could hear the laughter from my house. As I turned to leave her room, I spotted a piece of paper taped to her closet. Wr
itten on it, in French and in a blue marker, were the words: ‘What would Prince Charming have for occupation if he had not to awaken the Sleeping Beauty?’

  On her desk lay an open notebook, she had scribbled Basil’s name in the margins. I looked for my name. It was not there. I flipped through the notebook. It was not her diary. I glanced across the room. There was no diary.

  I ran past the living room where Monsieur Mermier had died. It was unrecognisable. A different TV set, white walls, all new couches. One of them was still wrapped in nylon. I could not tell you where exactly we had found the body or the glass. I saw the blood in a pool on the floor. Had I ever seen the body? Why had Estelle wanted me to embarrass myself? Did she know that her notebook was open? Did she remember what she had scribbled? What would Monsieur Mermier have thought of her?

  ‘My hero,’ said my mother, as I opened the door, and she wrapped her arms around my neck.

  ‘Turns out I had the key all along,’ said Estelle, as she dug both her hands into her pockets and then held out the key, ‘but we thought we’d let you open the door anyway since you went through all that trouble.’

  I looked down at my shoes then at her, then walked past my father and into my room. I heard laughter coming from the hallway. I later found out those were Simone de Beauvoir’s words taped to the closet. Also, French.

  Detention went by quicker than we expected. The school was unaccustomed to dishing them out and Basil and I spent the first period with Ms Kristina and the second with Mr Malik.

  ‘Maybe it was just a coincidence,’ said Basil, pursing his lips.

  ‘No. You know what she’s like.’

  ‘A girl.’

  ‘Sophistique. Chic. French.’

  ‘Croissant.’

  ‘Baguette.’

  ‘Fromage. Tour Eiffel. Champs-Élysées. ‘

  ‘Saint-Exupery. Zidane. Voltaire. Charles de Gaulle. Jacques Chirac. Barthez.’

  ‘Oui.’

  ‘Better than you and me.’

  Ms Kristina never gave us anything to do. She would sit and correct papers, often leaning forward to decipher this or that student’s handwriting. Basil and I would spend the first hour making up stories about Momo the Child Molester. They were these macabre little stories about a failed Child Molester who would follow a child around for weeks only to fall at the final hurdle. Basil was always better at drawing the story out and adding the details. I’d have the last word. They would regularly end with Momo saying something like ‘never mind, he was too old anyway’. But Basil made the stories real, frequently giving the Child Molester a redeemable feature, though not necessarily profoundly humane or relatable. My favourite was the one in which Momo the Child Molester gets electrocuted trying to molest a child. I do not recall the details of that story, but in the end it turns out Momo was an organ donor. I was irritated at the time because by killing Momo off, Basil had robbed me of my final line. This manifested itself in a heated debate about whether or not anyone would want the organs of a deceased child molester. Basil argued that it could prolong the life of a child, or his parents. I argued that I would not place in my chest the heart of a man who would place his penis in a child. I was confident I was on the right side of this moral dilemma but then Basil noted that we had not yet decided what the epitaph would read. And I had the perfect line.

  Mr Malik gave us assignments to start on in detention and submit in class the next day. I relished the writing, it was reading the work aloud which I struggled adjusting to. The audience consisted of a reluctant Basil and a belligerent Mr Malik, neither of whom gave the impression of being enamored by my way with words. I soon discovered that an audience of two is the most difficult of all. Any attempt at an Iambic pentameter was met with a nod of approval from Mr Malik and a shake of the head from Basil. Piss-taking metaphors which eschewed substance for humour often elicited Basil’s trademark wink and bite of the tongue, and Mr Malik’s glare.

  ‘He’s doing this on purpose you know,’ said Basil, ‘getting her to go first, then stepping in to ruin it. I don’t mind seeing his ugly face on any given day. But it’s the contrast that kills you.’

  On the last day of detention, Mr Malik asked us to write a short essay each entitled ‘Why I Write’.

  Basil said he did not write at all. He said he only wrote because he was told to. I told him to pretend that he had a reason for writing. He pretended not to hear me.

  In class, the next day, Mr Malik stopped the session ten minutes early, took out my paper and ordered me to stand in front of class and read it. I shook my head. He nodded.

  ‘We don’t have all day,’ he said, shoving the essay against my chest as I stood in front of class.

  I saw a red circle around an empty space at the top centre of the page, and the words ‘no title’ underlined twice above it.

  ‘I write because if I screamed at the top of my voice, my father would lump me with a book entitled The Life and Times of Antoun Saadeh by an author named Wahid Saleme,’ I said, holding the paper with both hands. ‘I write because if I were to whisper in my friend’s ear, she would put finer words on a poster and brandish it in my face. I write because voice is measured in decibels and ink in decades. I write because my pen is limited. When I asked it to fly to the moon, it refused. When I asked it again, it insisted that birds fly in the sky, pens write on paper and clouds write stanzas in the sky and look like paper to the naked eye. When I asked it for the third time, it dried up and stopped speaking to me. I write because Shawki pushes me to do so.’

  Shawk means passion, a deep yearning. The pronunciation of which differs only slightly from that of the Arabic word for thorn, the kind often found in one’s side. I looked up at Estelle. Her chin rested on her fist. The class was quiet. I could hear the hum of the overhead fan. Even Basil tilted forward.

  ‘He said to me once: “Adam.”’ I winced, and heard the stuttering laughs. ‘He said, “writing without shawk, Adam, is like eating without hunger. Tasteless.”’

  Basil crossed his arms.

  ‘So I called him Shawki.’

  Estelle grinned. Her lips parted wide enough for me to see her canines, and long enough for me to see her wisdom teeth which had not yet pierced their way through her gums. Nor would they for many years.

  ‘For those of you who do not know Shawki: he is an old man in his early seventies. His beard is white and long. He is small in stature and bald. He stands hunched over behind me whenever I hold a pen in my hand and surveys the white paper in anticipation. He pokes me with his cane and sometimes, he’ll fall over and I have to interrupt my train of thought and pick him up with both hands. But the train doesn’t stop. You ask: “Where are you going with my thoughts train?”’

  I grimaced at this. Mr Malik allowed himself a snort.

  ‘And the train whistles back, cursing you in the process. And as he curses you, he namechecks your father and your mother and your sister and your brother, Ussama, and your generous wife and her miserly neighbour and Madame Hafez and her husband, Monsieur Hafez. And Monsieur Mermier. And your old friend Estelle.’

  I looked up at Estelle again. She gave no sign of being taken aback at the mention of her name.

  ‘I write because I do not know how to paint, or sing or carve or knit or box or play an instrument or chop a tomato or peel a potato or fly to the moon. I write because if I stopped writing, the sun would cease to rise and the animals would cease to breathe and the Earth would cease to revolve. Because the Earth revolves around the tip of my pencil. I write because I am a militiaman who forgot his RPG at home, and took to the streets armed with an unsharpened pencil which he found in his mother’s purse while he was looking for chewing gum. I write because there are very few verbs and very many nouns. I write because…’ I read the last paragraph in one breath.

  Mr Malik waived his hand for me to stop.

  ‘Enough. Return to your seat,’ said Mr Malik. ‘Give this to your father. Tell him there is more life in this than the dire shit about dead p
eople he hands in to An-Nahar on a weekly basis.’

  ‘Tell him to shove his bachelor’s degree in Arabic Literature up his barely literate backside,’ said my father, after I’d relayed Mr Malik’s words, ‘but this is good.’

  ‘Sweet boy,’ said my mother, laughing. And at first I thought she meant me, but she had not. She meant Mr Malik.

  ‘Such a sweet, sweet man that Malik. Give him a hug from me when you see him next, will you?’

  Mr Malik was many things, and chief amongst them round, but he was not sweet. He was so round in fact that any attempt to describe the man as anything other than that ended with those same words bouncing off his round frame and rebounding onto the wall like a bullet ricocheting off the hinges of a door or the metal railings on a balcony.

  I nodded but had no intention of giving Mr Malik a hug. My father ignored the exchange and proceeded to examine my paper. He held it up against the light, as if to check if it had been forged. He stared at me again, squinting as he did so, his newspaper resting on his lap. I held his stare.

  ‘This is better than good,’ he said.

  A couple of weeks later, my father chucked his An-Nahar at me in the morning.

  ‘Two writers in the family now,’ said my mother, smiling. She had eyelashes which curled to the point of a near perfect circle, forever caught in a loop.

  ‘When can I publish an article?’ asked my sister.

  I opened the newspaper in front of me. It was large and unwieldy. Two or four sheets fell off.

  ‘Fold it,’ instructed my father.

  I folded the paper. I read my own words on the twelfth page. They were more authoritative, wiser, more assured. I read my name. Adam Najjar. I read the title: ‘I Write Because’.

  ‘Who chose that?’ I asked.

  ‘One of the editors. You didn’t title it.’

  ‘I don’t like it.’

  ‘Remember to title your stuff then.’

  I read the article next to it. ‘To Live in Beirut on a Monday’. I stopped halfway. I reread my article. Mine was better. I grinned.

  I took the article with me to class. Mohammad and Wael told every single teacher that I’d had an article published in An-Nahar.