‘Isn’t this better than walking on the moon?’
‘It is close enough.’
‘I’m breaking up with you,’ said Nadine, as she made her way out of the pool.
She sat on the edge of the pool first then swung her legs out of the water.
I tilted my head to the left so that another Roman column stood between the sun and my eyes. There were bullet holes etched across the column in the form of a ribbon, remnants of the civil war.
‘Hail Caesar,’ I said.
‘What?’ asked Nadine, wrapping a towel around her waist.
‘I understand,’ I said, tipping over the rest of a warm Corona I had left by the foot of the chair to try the whiskey.
‘I hope you do it,’ she said, ‘I hope you spend your whole life working hard for it. I hope you become the first Arab to stand on the surface of the moon, all alone and against all the odds. And I hope you look back and realise that it was not worth it in the end.’
I had the urge to wash away the bitter taste of alcohol from my mouth, to bite off half an apple or to shove a vine of grapes down my throat. I swallowed my own saliva and I clicked my tongue and I heard my dry mouth curse Jim and Johnnie and Jack. I threw up. I wiped my mouth.
‘I want to go home,’ I said.
‘I’ll drive you home. I’ve got to go to the hospital anyway,’ hissed the doctor.
Nadine ripped the towel off her body and threw it at her father. Then she turned and walked away. And I swallowed more of my own saliva and observed the bullet-ridden Roman column.
‘That’s enough,’ shouted the doctor after her, launching his glass into the air.
It spun along a vertical axis, overtaking the sun at one point without flipping, before landing in the pool.
His left hand gripped the armrest as he bit his upper lip.
I craned my neck in time to spot the Sri Lankan housemaid bending over to pick the wet bikini off the floor. There behind her was Nadine’s olive, bare backside. On her left butt cheek were two perfectly aligned moles such that if you were to tilt your head to the same side and at a certain angle, you might feel obliged to return the smile. She had walked past the maid towards the door leading into the hallway, now unburdened by the weight of the bikini or the towel or the water.
The doctor drove his grey Mercedes Benz well for a man who had drank a quarter of a bottle of whiskey. He gripped the steering wheel with both hands and watched the road ahead and said nothing for the length of the journey.
‘Is this your home?’ he asked, looking out the window.
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘we don’t have a swimming pool.’
I meant to say that from our balcony you could see a fraction of the Mediterranean Sea. When there was no electricity in Beirut, as was often the case, you could spot the sun set behind a haphazard collection of war-torn buildings and half-baked attempts at invincible skyscrapers, or hear the echoing sound of afternoon prayer or the hoarse voice of the grocer as he pushes his cart down an empty street every Sunday at five: ‘I have carrots, I have zucchini, I have vine leaves, I have zucchini, I have parsley, I have zucchini,’ and once, ‘I have no one, zucchini, no one cares, zucchini.’ But I didn’t.
‘That’s fine,’ he said, rubbing his eyes with his knuckles. ‘The world isn’t split into people who do own swimming pools and people who do not.’
‘Are you alright?’ I asked.
He removed his foot from the brakes allowing the car to roll slowly. Then he applied his foot to the brakes with a little more force than necessary. I thought I saw him nod, but it could have been the brakes.
‘Thanks for the Corona. And the Jack Daniels,’ I said, as I slammed the car door shut behind me. ‘And the ride.’
‘Johnnie Walker,’ said Dr. Antoine, as he rolled up the window. ‘Pass my regards on to your father for me. Tell him to leave the dead alone.’
The morning Mohammad and Basil returned to school, having served their suspension, I sat in my seat nursing a headache. While my classmates stood up straight beside their desks with the national anthem echoing throughout the school, I pressed the palms of my hands against my ears and placed my forehead on the table. I could still hear the first stanza.
All of us! For our Country, for our Glory and Flag!
Our valour and our writings are the envy of the ages.
Our mountain and our valley, they bring forth stalwart men.
And to Perfection we devote our words and labour.
I felt Basil’s nimble fingers flicking my ear. I waved his hand away. Then I felt another hand, this one meatier, on my shoulder. The sheer weight of the hand resting on my right shoulder made me sit up straight. I looked up to see Mr Malik with one eyebrow raised and his entire mouth shifted to one side of his face.
He nodded his head and my classmates took their seats.
‘Apropos of nothing, are you not Lebanese, Najjar?’ he asked.
‘Yes, sir,’ I said. I debated telling him that my father’s grandfather was in fact fleetingly French, and that my maternal grandparents were both Palestinian. I did not.
‘Would you stand up for the Marseillaise?’ he asked.
‘No, sir.’
‘Would you stand up to ask God to save the Queen?’
‘No, sir.’
‘Is Deutschland, Deutschland uber alles?’ asked Mr Malik. His words would not have felt out of sync had they been accompanied by music.
‘No, sir,’ I said. I was unsure what he meant by this, but I sensed that there was a rhythm to these questions and I knew not to interrupt the rhythm.
Mr Malik narrowed his eyes and thinned his lips. As a member of the SSNP, his entire political ambition was to do away with Lebanon.
I shrugged my shoulders. He gave me a slap on the back and hobbled back to his seat. Mr Malik had a very specific way of standing while the national anthem was being played every morning. He would never place his hand on his heart or pump his chest and belt out the anthem itself. He repeatedly told students off for doing the former and openly showed his disdain for the latter. Instead, he placed his arms rigidly by his sides and extended his neck forward. He glowered straight ahead but not in a determined sort of way. His eyes betrayed a sorrow, a resigned sense of something lost.
‘His youth?’ ventured Basil, on more than one occasion with the anthem blasting in the background.
‘No, something more concrete,’ I said, believing every word.
‘His hair?’ asked Mohammad. ‘The vast majority of it, anyway.’
‘A person, I think.’
‘His barber,’ said Wael.
Mr Malik sat behind his desk and scratched his nose.
‘Ask not what your country can do for you,’ muttered Mr Malik, to no one in particular, ‘ask what you can do for your country.’
‘Kennedy,’ said Mohammad, nodding.
‘Gibran Khalil Gibran,’ said Mr Malik, rolling his eyes without moving his neck. ‘The assassinated bastard stole it.’
This seemed to me at the time an attempt to instill national pride in young, impressionable minds. Had Mr Malik not proceeded to undermine his good work, I would have settled on that assumption.
‘Our writings are the envy of the ages,’ continued Mr Malik, now pointing the knuckle of his index finger in my direction. ‘It says so in the anthem.’
‘Yes, sir,’ said Ali, failing to spot the hint of irony in Mr Malik’s voice.
The implication was that the least I, a hungover, disinterested student, could do for my country is to stand up for its national anthem. Mr Malik did not articulate this because, as a teacher of Arabic literature, he revelled in planting hidden, but not subtle, meanings in his sentences; or because he was a Syrian nationalist/ SSNP.
Mr Malik then claimed that the whole tune was stolen from the anthem of a failed state in Morocco at the onset of the twentieth century.
With the anthem still ringing in my ears, I flung myself out of the uncomfortable, wooden green chair and burst through the cla
ssroom door, only to throw up at the feet of the Syrian janitor who had been leaning against the lockers outside class. Audible chuckles and several turned heads greeted my swift re-entry, but nothing would disrupt Mr Malik’s resolve.
That session we were supposed to cover Qays’ ‘Majnun Layla’. The Bedouin poet who so loved a married woman named Layla that he went mad, wandering the desert for years until he was finally found dead by her grave where he had carved some of his verses on stone.
Mr Malik, however, would tell us all about ‘Majnun Layla’ on another day. Instead, he instructed us to turn our textbooks to the pages marked ‘The Modern Era’. We did this, and he pointed to a text titled ‘You Have Your Lebanon and I Have Mine’ by Gibran Khalil Gibran.
Your Lebanon is an arena for men from the West and men from the East.
My Lebanon is a flock of birds fluttering in the early morning as shepherds lead their sheep into the meadow and rising in the evening as farmers return from their fields and vineyards.
You have your Lebanon and its people. I have my Lebanon and its people.
Yours are those whose souls were born in the hospitals of the West; they are as ship without rudder or sail upon a raging sea… They are strong and eloquent among themselves but weak and dumb among Europeans.
That is as far as we ever got with the text in class. Mr Malik never allowed us to find out more about Gibran’s Lebanon, he never asked whether we agreed with him or whether we thought he was a bit too sentimental and idealistic. He never asked us about our Lebanon. He asked the janitor whose mop had made its way in and out of the class door repeatedly with the smell of detergents overtaking the room, as the latter listened in on Mr Malik’s impromptu lecture. The barrel-chested janitor mentioned the glorious cedar tree, then he resumed mopping up the mess for which I was responsible. It was the same cedar tree which featured on the Lebanese flag and had often been mistaken for a Christmas tree.
Mr Malik did tell us all about his Lebanon which was not Lebanon at all. He even declared that in most of Khalil Gibran’s writings the word ‘Lebanon’ had replaced the original ‘Syria’ which Gibran used to denote the region. For the next half an hour, Mr Malik proceeded to rip the country’s fabric to shreds.
‘You think houmous is Lebanese?’
It was on this day that I learned of the myth of Fakheridine: that the Ottoman empire did not have a record of the Lebanese prince who nearly brought it to its knees; that he did not exist at all in his modern incarnation; that old men with white beards tend to let you down that way. Mr Malik was almost as animated as Mr Aston had been throughout the Englishman’s delivery of his Gatsby lecture. Except Mr Malik never moved from his chair. He stayed seated for the entire session. He threatened to stand up at one point, having grown tired of sitting, but the act tired him more so he waved a hand contemptuously and pretended to adjust his seating position. When he was done, all that was left was the cedar tree.
‘What’s your point?’ asked Wael, gripping the edges of the table tightly.
Wael was a patriot at heart, he had not yet figured it out for himself.
Mr Malik surveyed the class. Then he looked up at the overhead fan and back down at Wael and sighed.
‘Your father is a Phalangist, fascist, isolationist, separatist pimp. Isn’t he?’
The Phalangists were a Christian party with its own militia during the civil war in the seventies and eighties. One of the founders of the party, Pierre Gemayel, had captained the Lebanese football team that went to the Berlin 1936 Olympics held in the Olympiastadion. He wanted to bring that discipline and sense of order back with him to Lebanon, he said. He was not speaking about the football.
The party soon distanced itself from Nazism and played a major role in the Sabra and Chatilla refugee camp massacre, facilitated by the Israeli army, which resulted in thousands of Palestinian casualties.
Women and children were rounded up and brought into the Camille Chamoun Sports City Stadium in Beirut. They were told they would be buried alive within the stadium. Then a bomb went off somewhere close by and the Phalangists and the Palestinians, alike, fled. The stadium itself was flattened by the Israelis. The history of the Phalangists spans stadia.
‘Is he?’ asked Wael.
The swastika in Mr Malik’s office spun a few times.
‘What about Moussa’s Castle?’ asked Serene, tilting her head to the side as if the Arabic teacher had spent the best part of the last hour insulting her person. ‘That’s Lebanese.’
Mohammad leapt up and slammed his hand against his desk sending a jolt through the classroom.
‘That’s it. And Moussa himself?’ added the momentarily high-pitched descendent of some long-ago Crusader.
When Mr Malik left class, we read on, each silently in his own seat. Wael had forgotten his book so he stood over me and read Gibran from mine.
‘What will remain of your Lebanon after a century? Do you think the atmosphere will preserve in its pockets the shadows of death and the stench of graves?’
Did he know?
‘I say to you that an olive plant in the hills of Lebanon will outlast all of your deeds and your works; that the wooden plough pulled by the oxen in the crannies of Lebanon is nobler than your dreams and aspirations.’
‘I really thought houmous was Lebanese,’ said Serene, lifting the silence.
An image of Serene licking houmous from a spoon crossed my mind. Her tongue was extended, unnecessarily, outside of her mouth and the spoon was held at a certain angle such that instead of bringing the spoon to her mouth she had to lean forward in order to lick the houmous off the spoon.
‘It is,’ said Wael, ‘forget that Syrian nationalist paedophile.’
The Sabra and Chatilla massacre conducted by the Lebanese Forces (the military branch of the Phalangists), with the aid of the Israelis, was in retaliation for the assassination of the son of the former football captain. The son, Basheer Gemayel, was a short, chubby, weak-chinned and physically unimposing man in contrast with his tall, broad-jawed and traditionally handsome father, Pierre. Basheer was also president elect at the time, a young thirty-something-year-old with charisma and oratory skills to rival Hitler’s. It was Habib Shartouni, a member of the SSNP, who had assassinated him.
‘You stand accused of killing the President of the Republic of Lebanon,’ said the judge.
‘I killed a Mossad agent,’ said Habib.
Habib then retired to write poetry somewhere in Paris.
‘Where’s Basil?’ I asked Mohammad who was seated behind me.
Wael, his eyes still rooted to the textbook, pointed in the general direction of the door and mumbled something about Basil having followed the Syrian paedophile out of class. The janitor slammed a pungent black nylon trash bag onto the desk in front of me.
CAPTAIN DRUZE
Serene was Druze. She was from the mountains and had the same accent as Basil, except it seemed more tolerable on her. We went to a pub called the Shipman’s Crew. She said she had never been to the pub but that her father knew the bartender well. She said her parents would disown her if they found out she was going out with a Muslim. I said I wasn’t a Muslim.
‘Christian then,’ she said, ‘it’s all the same. They will disown me.’
There were ropes hanging from one end of the ceiling to the other. Some of them hung low and others had been cut off in places, presumably because they had irritated the Captain at some point. There was also a miniature, rusty anchor on the wall behind the bar. The Captain would touch it on his way to the cash register, or the fridge or the tap.
‘Not that either.’
‘You’re not Druze though, are you?’
‘No.’
‘Then we are back to where we started. Are you at least rich?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘Have you ever had sex?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘You’re very straightforward.’
From my seat, at the corner of the small, dimly lit pub, I could see Mr Aston at the bar. He
was looking at an empty drink and I told the Captain to bring him a new one. He was having an Amaretto Sour which was a common enough drink for a teenage Lebanese girl but unusual for a former English pastor.
‘I’ll bring him a drink when he asks for one,’ said the Captain, wiping the table with his dirty cloth. His back was hunched because of a motorcycle accident in his younger days but you couldn’t tell because he still managed to tower over most people. ‘What are you having?’
‘Almaza,’ I said, ‘two of those.’
‘I don’t do Almaza, anymore,’ said the Captain. ‘They were bought by Heineken. The hops are imported from Holland. I have 961 Beer, if you want the local stuff.’
961 is the country code for Lebanon. Dial 961 and a Lebanese phone number and you might get the voice of a man or a woman who will at first speak to you in Arabic with that soft Lebanese dialect, and, if you do not say anything back, they will ask you in French if you are fluent in French. Stay silent for a little while longer, and they will ask you in English if you would prefer to speak in English. Stay silent long enough, and they will insult you in all three languages, but mainly in Arabic. Almost exclusively in Arabic, if they are angry enough.
The Captain placed the two bottles of 961 on the table and opened the bottle caps. The bottle was dark and the label yellow. Serene slammed the bottom of her 961 bottle against the tip of mine which sent the lager shooting straight up the bottle. I tipped the bottle into my mouth and tried my best to drink most of it. I coughed and a bit of beer spilt onto the table.
‘Nothing like Lebanese hops,’ said Serene.
‘What are you, twelve?’ asked the Captain.
‘Something like that,’ she said.
‘These are coasters,’ he said, waving two coasters in my face, ‘use them. The bottle goes on the coaster. The coaster stays on the table.’
‘Aye aye, Captain,’ said Serene. She could turn most things into a joke and her laugh was bright and high but also restrained and rarely, if ever, lasted beyond the time it took her to place a hand over her mouth.
Between Beirut and the Moon Page 12