Between Beirut and the Moon

by A. Naji Bakhti

  ‘These boys are trouble,’ said Mr Malik, ‘I’ve been telling you this for a while now. They’ve dragged my reputation and the reputation of this school through the dirt.’

  ‘They messed up,’ said Ms Katerina, ‘but Mr Aston disrespected their religion. What were they supposed to do?’

  ‘Not beat each other up, Katerina,’ said Mr Malik, ‘stay out of this if you’re going to make it more complicated than it is.’

  ‘The Englishman has to go,’ repeated Mr Abu Alam.

  ‘I agree,’ said Mohammad.

  ‘Shut up,’ said Mr Abu Alam.

  ‘What about Wael?’ asked Ms Katerina, crossing her arms.

  ‘What about him?’ asked Ms Iman.

  She turned her head towards Wael, not Ms Katerina, as if he were the one making a case for his own innocence.

  ‘He is a Christian who was defending his Muslim friend’s right to listen to Azan,’ said Ms Katerina. ‘Shouldn’t we be encouraging this sort of thing?’

  ‘He had his hands around my throat,’ I said.

  ‘That’s true,’ said Wael, nodding. ‘I also elbowed a younger boy in the face and poked one of the football boys in the eye.’

  He was more afraid of being left out of the collective punishment than anything else.

  A hint of a smile flashed upon Ms Iman’s otherwise straight face. She may have found Wael’s willingness to die by the sword admirable or, possibly, amusing.

  ‘Either way, you can’t blame the entire playground debacle on these four,’ said Ms Katerina.

  ‘What do you think, Abed?’ asked Ms Iman, glancing at the short Egyptian boy, before casting her eyes on the four of us again.

  ‘I think that a foul is a foul only when the referee blows his whistle. Otherwise, it’s a claim for a foul and that’s not the same,’ said Abed, beaming.

  Mr Malik placed his hand on Abed’s shoulder and guided him to the door. He ushered him outside then slammed it behind him. He mumbled something about not having time for cryptic, football trivia then crossed his arms and glared at Ms Iman, who promptly took the lead.

  ‘Who threw the first punch?’ asked Ms Iman.

  ‘Mohammad did,’ said Basil.

  ‘Only because he missed,’ said Mohammad.

  ‘He called my mother a goat-worshipper.’

  ‘Isn’t she?’ asked Ms Iman.

  ‘That’s not the point.’

  ‘What about you, Armstrong?’

  ‘I was defending the goat-worshipper’s son,’ I said.

  ‘Aren’t you going to call their parents?’ asked Mr Malik.

  ‘And have four sets of angry parents with different religious backgrounds in my office?’

  ‘It could start another civil war,’ said Mr Abu Alam, with a half-smile.

  ‘If you learn one thing,’ said Ms Iman, ‘from your entire experience at school, let it be that it is easier to make another boy bleed than it is to make him think.’

  ‘I’m not sure I understand what you mean by that,’ said Basil.

  ‘Me either,’ said Ms Katerina.

  ‘I can make you understand, Abu Mekhi,’ said Mr Abu Alam, waving an imaginary sandal in the air.

  ‘What will we have done, if we raise a generation like the last?’ said Ms Iman.

  ‘We are past that now,’ said Mr Malik.

  ‘At the centre of our galaxy,’ said Mr Abu Alam gravely, now clearing his throat, ‘there is a black hole.’

  There was no overhead fan in Ms Iman’s office, but had there been one we would have heard it hum as if from afar. Mr Malik’s rolling of his round eyes, a previously soundless regularity, emitted a squish loud enough to turn a head in his direction. It was unusual to witness Mr Abu Alam approach physics and chemistry, or rather astronomy, with the intent of delivering some somber and salient pedagogy. Wael’s neck twitched in anticipation of a flying sandal which never arrived.

  ‘A few relatively young stars exist around this supermassive black hole,’ continued Mr Abu Alam, looking upwards as if at the stars but finding only a ceiling without an overhead fan.

  Wael looked up too and received a smack on the back of the head from Basil.

  ‘Their existence has dumbfounded experts for years. They believe that the black hole should, in theory, have prevented those young stars from ever having been formed,’ said Mr Abu Alam, theatrically joining his fingers together. ‘In astronomy, it is referred to as the paradox of youth.’

  Squish.

  Ms Iman suspended all four of us for a week. She also blamed us for drawing a penis on the glass casing of the president’s portrait.

  ‘Mohammad doesn’t even know what a penis looks like, let alone how to draw one,’ said Basil.

  ‘That’s right. Basil’s the expert on penises,’ said Mohammad, which earned both of them an extra week each.

  She hadn’t noticed the ‘F-Art of Metis and Sons’. She warned that any more misdemeanours and she would expel us without hesitation. Abed’s skill on the ball earned him the grudging respect of the older boys, who allowed him to join their matches from then on. Over the coming weeks, we would hear his voice less frequently and, when we did, it was often through heavy breath just after he had been subbed off. Eventually, he did the honourable thing by announcing he would resign from commentary for good through the loudspeaker before kicking it halfway across the asphalt pitch. Abed had moved up in the world and there was no going back.

  My mother told me that I would sell Chicklets on the streets for five hundred Lebanese liras a packet, and live off the goodwill of others for the rest of my life. My father refused to speak to me for a week. He did not communicate with me through my mother or sister. He went about his daily routine without acknowledging my presence. The first couple of days, I said ‘hello’, ‘thank you’ and ‘goodnight’. I quickly realised that it didn’t matter so I stopped.

  On the third morning, I stood outside the bathroom door. I needed to excrete desperately unwanted wastes.

  ‘I have to go,’ I said.

  My father did not reply. I banged on the door with one hand on my crotch.

  ‘I need to go, now.’

  The door swung open and my father stood in front of me in his stained white flannel shirt and blue chequered shorts with a green towel around his neck. The smell of Gillette wafted through the door. He still had some shaving cream on some parts of his neck. One half of his face was unshaven. He wiped his mouth with the towel and blinked at me.

  I slid through and swung the door shut behind me. I slipped my boxers off and stood over the toilet.

  Nothing.

  My father kicked the door open and I sprayed the mirrors above the toilet seat with my urine. It was his way of telling me to hurry up. I put my boxers back on and left the bathroom. My father walked back in. I switched off the lights.

  ‘Damn your pimp father to hell,’ said my pimp father. ‘May he be violated by the son of a pimp’s dog.’

  I pictured it.

  To my young mind, the Pimp seemed an omnipresent power, a divine presence or, at the very least, an astute businessman and wealthy benefactor. This was how I explained away the fact that his name often preceded that of institutions or edifices or people or domesticated animals. It was the Pimp’s world and I accepted this early on without much deliberation.

  My mother put her arm around my neck and dragged me to the kitchen. I skipped over a puddle of water on the floor by the fridge. She made me a halloumi sandwich and watched me eat it. Then she made me another one with tomatoes and I ate that one too.

  ‘Life is running,’ she mumbled, a saying which both she and my father were fond of uttering sometimes in quick succession, other times independently and in starkly different tones.

  When my father said it, in his willful dictum voice, I always assumed he meant that ‘life is all about running from one place to another’ and that we must push ourselves because ‘tomorrow we will run faster, stretch our arms further and one fine day…’ When my mother said i
t, in her sorrowful lament voice, I always believed it meant that ‘life is running out’ and that there is no outrunning it.

  She waited until my father had left for work and taken my sister with him to the pimp school.

  ‘Tell me, honestly. Is this the influence of a political party? Is that what this is?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘Revolution? You can stay home and revolt for free. You know better than to listen to the propaganda of these militia parties, don’t you?’

  I nodded without committing to it.

  ‘Nothing good comes of it, Adam. They start recruitment early and then you’re stuck.’

  ‘It was a school fight. That’s all. It had nothing to do with a militia.’

  She breathed in.

  ‘Adam, you can’t keep doing this,’ said my mother, ‘you’re not like the other kids in your school. Their parents have money. They have lands and companies and property.’

  ‘That’s not my fault.’

  ‘No, it’s not,’ said my mother, leaning against the leaking fridge and crossing her arms. ‘It’s not your fault that we live in a rented apartment, or that we don’t own a car or that your allowance is half that of your classmates. None of it is your fault.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘Your father and I made that decision long ago. We chose your education over a comfortable lifestyle.’

  I shrugged. When God said: ‘let there be light’, he meant let there be pimp’s light.

  ‘You think you would stand a chance of becoming an astronaut without the best education money can buy in this country?’

  CANNONBALL

  When we walked back into school, Wael and I were treated like returning heroes. Basil and Mohammad were still suspended. The younger boys had their own stories about who we were fighting and with what degree of success. One story had it that the four of us had stood up to Mr Malik and that he’d somehow managed to turn us against one another, using his paedophilia. This story relied heavily on a lack of understanding of the word paedophilia. Another story had it that the four of us planned to sneak into the school at night and draw another penis on the president’s portrait, but were caught in the early stages, while fighting over who would take credit for the plan. Even the girls thought we were facetious enough to merit fleeting attention.

  ‘You know I had a crush on you when we were kids,’ said Nadine. ‘I thought you were so cute with your astronaut dreams and your steely determination. Of course, it’s not as cute now, but still beats future third-generation businessman.’

  She was forever caressing her eyelashes with her index fingers.

  ‘Thanks,’ I said.

  ‘Did anything happen between you and that French girl?’

  ‘Estelle? No.’

  ‘She was a weird one. Between her and goat-boy you had one hell of a group there.’

  I shrugged my shoulders. I was in the kitchen again and my mother was telling me off for being the son of lower-middle-class parents living in a rented apartment and attending an expensive private school. In my mind, I was always eating the halloumi sandwich while she lectured me. It wasn’t true.

  ‘Do you want to be my boyfriend?’ asked Nadine.

  ‘Okay,’ I said.

  She stuck her tongue down my throat and then held my hand tightly.

  Her father was a good surgeon but a failed politician. He owned land and property and, if you count the chauffeur and the housemaids and the cooks on minimum wage, people. I met him a couple of days later when I was invited to Nadine’s house in Rabieh.

  There were no tall buildings and stuffy apartments in Rabieh. There were houses and mansions and pools in backyards with bars inside them. I saw a cross on the door of every house and a housemaid cleaning the porch in front of every other one. Trees extended into the street and belonged to people because they grew in backyards. I saw an Aston Martin with a Lebanese license plate and a Porsche Cayenne with an American license plate. There were gates and fences with signs that said ‘Do Not Trespass’ or ‘Beware: Dog’, and I thought ‘you’re bluffing’.

  The maid, a short elderly woman from Sri Lanka, ushered me to the swimming pool outside. There was nothing special about Nadine’s place, except that they had a balcony overlooking the pool but none overlooking the street and a single Roman column standing by the gate. Nadine threw her bag on the floor and ran upstairs. The Sri Lankan woman picked it up. I stood outside by the pool. It was one of those round ones. There was a trampoline on one side and a swing on the other. Neither had been used much. The nylon packaging which dangled off the trampoline’s edge had been only partly removed, as if the trampoline itself was too large and a mere third of it was all that was required.

  ‘I never had a son,’ said Nadine’s father, Dr. Antoine. He sat on one of the sunbeds and I sat on a chair beside it. He was short with thick-rimmed glasses and a moustache. His hair combed itself. He wore navy blue shorts with a pager attached to them.

  ‘I never had a rich father,’ I said.

  It was a line out of Basil’s textbook. Dr. Antoine laughed. He took a sip of his Johnnie Walker.

  ‘What’ll you have, habibi?’

  The Sri Lankan housemaid stood behind him.

  ‘Almaza,’ I said.

  ‘Where are you from, Najjar?’

  ‘Beirut.’

  ‘Where in Beirut?’

  ‘West Beirut.’

  ‘Aren’t you Muslim?’

  ‘I drink.’

  ‘Your father doesn’t mind?’

  ‘No. We drink Arak together sometimes.’

  He waved his hand. She disappeared.

  ‘We don’t have Almaza,’ he said, ‘she’s going to bring you a Corona or a Heineken.’

  ‘Cannonball!’ Nadine shouted.

  It was very American. A more authentic girl would have shouted ‘Yala’.

  She ran through the door in a blur. She leapt and clutched her knees in midair, pulling them towards her chest and spinning as she did so, then falling back-first into the swimming pool. Warm water splashed against my ankles and Dr. Antoine’s. There were white lines on her shoulders from a different bikini. She already had larger breasts than the rest of the girls in class combined. Dr. Antoine clapped. He passed me a glass, I did not know of what.

  ‘I taught her how to do the dive head-first. But she insists on doing this.’

  ‘Where’s your mother?’ I asked Nadine.

  ‘She’s in Paris. She runs a business from over there. It’s a clothing line.’

  ‘That’s what we tell her,’ said Dr. Antoine leaning in and pinching my ear between his index and thumb.

  Johnnie Walker travelled up my nostrils.

  ‘Do you like it?’ asked Nadine.

  ‘Of course, he likes it.’

  ‘It’s alright.’

  ‘Adam wants to be an astronaut,’ said Nadine.

  Dr. Antoine laughed.

  ‘I know your father,’ said Dr. Antoine, ‘he’s the journalist, isn’t he?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘He was SSNP for a while in the eighties. He keeps writing about dead people now. Why does he keep writing about dead people?’

  ‘I’ll ask him.’

  ‘I liked his earlier work,’ he said taking another sip of his whiskey. ‘It was listing, really, that’s all it was. That was his thing, wasn’t it?’

  ‘I suppose,’ I said, as I observed Nadine performing a near perfect breaststroke.

  ‘Like a shopping list, but it made sense. Or it didn’t. I don’t know. But it got you thinking about ideas, not people.’

  ‘Jump in,’ said Nadine, splashing water in my direction.

  ‘Living breathing ideas,’ said Dr. Antoine, ‘not dead people.’

  The water was fresh and smelled of chlorine and Nadine’s perfume. The Mediterranean was nowhere within sight.

  ‘I don’t have swimming trunks,’ I said.

  ‘The docteur will lend you some,’ she said.

  Her father
was French educated, meaning he spoke French as a second language.

  ‘She thinks it pisses me off when she calls me the docteur,’ he said, staring at his daughter. ‘It doesn’t really. I am the docteur. I worked hard to earn that title. I did not work nearly as hard to become a father.’

  ‘Later,’ I said, splashing her with Corona.

  ‘The newspaper has been shit for years anyway. It used to be the voice of the people. Now it’s the voice of a few capitalists with more money than they know what to do with,’ said Dr. Antoine. He poured himself some more. He spoke as if he wasn’t sitting in front of his own swimming pool in Rabieh.

  ‘It’s corrupt,’ I said, taking a sip of my Corona, ‘everything’s corrupt.’

  I liked pretending to be a rich man who was pretending to be poor.

  ‘The whole country is corrupt. I should have stayed in London.’

  ‘London?’

  Nadine floated on her back. She had somehow acquired Ray-Bans and they made her look older still.

  ‘I got my degree from the University of Edinburgh. Best years of my life,’ he said, scratching at the label of the bottle, ‘have you heard the joke about the Saudi Arabian in London?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘So this Saudi Arabian student in London writes his father – this was before the internet – and he says “Dear Father, I love my Ferrari. But everyone in London rides trains.” So his Saudi father responds with “Dear Son, I’ve wired you some money. Go buy yourself a train and stop embarrassing us.”’

  He extended his glass and knocked his head back and laughed in the direction of the sun. I did the same. Then we drank. And I had five more Coronas and a sip of the doctor’s whiskey.

  ‘Another?’ asked the good doctor.

  ‘No more,’ I said, but I smiled and took another sip of his whiskey. It was a Jack Daniels or a Johnnie Walker. It did not make sense to me that whiskey would be named after men. It is one of those questions I asked myself just that one time and I never asked again. I asked it of other people after four or five drinks because it seemed like an insightful thing to articulate, but I did not privately turn it over in my head. Men. The patriarchy. Whiskey. Drink.