Between Beirut and the Moon

by A. Naji Bakhti

  ‘You know what your problem is?’ she asked, as I leaned in to kiss her.

  ‘What?’

  ‘You’re too eager,’ she said, then she kissed me. ‘You’re an eager little boy. You should be more patient, little astronaut boy.’

  ‘You know about that?’

  ‘The whole school knows about that,’ she said, placing a hand on my neck, ‘the Don wouldn’t shut up about it and now Ms Iman won’t shut up about it either. You’re the boy who won’t grow up. The first Arab astronaut. The eager Arab astronaut.’

  I laughed and tried to kiss her again, but she pushed me away with the tips of her fingers.

  ‘Will you draw my initials on a moon rock so that they can stay there forever?’

  ‘Why would they stay there forever?’

  ‘Because there is no wind on the moon. For an aspiring astronaut, you don’t know much about the moon, do you?’

  She placed a hand over her mouth, preemptively, and I heard her muffled bright laugh.

  ‘Did you hear about him and Ms Mayssa?’ she asked, nudging her head in the direction of the bar. ‘Apparently, she left the mayor of Jib Janine to be with him. And now they’ve had a big falling out and he’s not doing very well.’

  ‘The Captain and the ‘Black Widow’?’

  ‘Not the Captain. The Englishman. And don’t call her that,’ she said, as I rubbed the back of my neck. ‘She doesn’t want to move to London with him.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I don’t know. Maybe she still loves the mayor.’

  ‘Of Jib Janine?’

  ‘Yes. Or maybe she loves Beirut too much.’

  ‘How do you know all this?’

  ‘My mother told me.’

  ‘How does your mother know all this?’

  ‘The neighbours told her.’

  ‘How do they know?’

  ‘Don’t be stupid. The neighbours always know.’

  I propped my elbow against the bar and ordered another two cold 961s. The Captain mentioned something about coasters then handed me both.

  ‘Did you dial 961, sir?’ I said, offering a bottle to Mr Aston as he sat slouched over.

  Mr Aston said that he did not accept drinks from minors. He said that I should be home, probably in bed. He said he had not dialed 961 because he was in Lebanon and you do not dial the country code when you are in the country.

  ‘But what if you’re at home and need to call Beirut?’ I asked.

  ‘Who says I’m not at home here?’ he asked, taking a sip of the 961.

  ‘Mr Aston, the Beiruti,’ I said, raising my bottle in the air. Mr Aston ignored it.

  ‘Home is where the heart belongs.’

  I shook my head and stared into Mr Aston’s blue eyes and the stars stared back at me.

  ‘Is the boy bothering you, David?’ asked the Captain.

  Serene knocked back the last bit of 961 in her bottle. She shifted in her seat. I gave her a wink and she ignored it. She looked up at the ropes hanging from the ceiling, then she shrugged, then she pursed her lips, then she shrugged again and looked past me and crossed her legs and blew her nose and bit her lip then she gaped down at her bottle and she was lost in it. She did all those things, in some order, before I could open my eyelid. When I did, my eye felt heavy and I picked the crust out with my index finger and rubbed it with my knuckles.

  ‘Home is where the soul settles and memories stay.’

  I shook my head again. He squinted, the universe contracted, and gaped down at his bottle and for a moment he was lost in it too.

  ‘I can tell him to go home,’ said the Captain.

  ‘First you make friends,’ he said, waving the Captain away with his hand and taking another sip of the 961, ‘then you make memories with friends, those memories happen in a place, that place develops meaning, and that meaning, given enough time, is home.’

  He said this calmly while staring at an old thousand lira bill taped to the wall behind the bar.

  ‘What happens when the friends leave?’ I asked, pressing the cold bottle against my eye.

  ‘Then they take a part of home with them.’

  ‘Nonsense,’ said the Captain. ‘Home is about roots, about history. You don’t choose home. You’re born into it.’

  Then the Captain recited that infamous Mahmoud Darwiche poem in English. The very same one which hung in Mr Malik’s cramped office. It was the line about his roots being ‘entrenched before the birth of time, before the opening of the eras, before the pines, and the olive trees and before the grass grew’.

  It seemed everyone in the world knew that poem by heart, or had it posted on a board somewhere or their fridge or put in a frame where a photograph of their loved ones used to be.

  A few years after he passed away, Mahmoud Darwiche’s private possessions, including his briefcase, his typewriter and a few unpublished papers, were confiscated from his former home in Palestine by the Israeli authorities. My outraged father sat down to write yet another article about yet another dead man.

  ‘To home,’ I said, raising my bottle in the air again and Mr Aston did the same. The Captain placed two coasters on the bar in front of us.

  With one hand in mine and another over her mouth, Serene led me into the one toilet and closed the door behind us. She began to bang her fists against the door rhythmically and I soon followed.

  ‘Did you tell him anything I told you?’ she asked, still banging her fists against the door.

  ‘No.’

  We did this for a few minutes, without looking at one another.

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘Yes,’ she said.

  ‘You better not be fucking in there, Najjar,’ shouted the Captain, ‘I know her father. He’s Druze. He’ll chop your dick off and force feed it to the goats when I tell him about this.’

  Serene kept banging her fists against the toilet door and I did the same.

  ‘Would he?’ I asked Serene.

  ‘Yes,’ she said.

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  She laughed for some time without placing a hand over her mouth. When she stopped laughing, she sat down on the floor, crossing her legs as she did so. Some of her knuckles were bruised and she reached for the toilet paper and wiped the tears from her eyes.

  ‘With a Druze girl? In the toilet of a pub?’ asked Basil, the next morning outside Mr Malik’s class. ‘Are you mentally challenged, son?’

  The Gauloises which had been moving up and down between his lips now stood still. Basil had developed the irritating habit of calling most men ‘son’.

  ‘We were just pretending,’ I said, waving the smoke away.

  ‘Tell me something, son of life. Were you wearing a space helmet while you were doing it? Because maybe that’s what this whole astronaut thing is about. Maybe it is just a sex fetish. Maybe your whole life has been building up to this moment when you and a Druze girl get together in a shitty pub, and you do her from behind with a space helmet on. And that’s it. We never hear about your space dreams ever again.’

  ‘No. I wasn’t.’

  ‘Try it. Next time. See how it goes.’

  ‘Do you think her father will chop my dick off and feed it to the goats?’

  ‘It has happened before.’

  Every so often the news would report an amusing story about a boy in a remote Druze village in the mountains who had had his genitals chopped off for having sexual intercourse with an unmarried Druze girl. The last one to be reported featured the father of the Druze girl in question, grinding the culprit’s penis before feeding it to his goat. The goat was called Ramzi and animal rights groups were outraged that Ramzi had been fed the sinner’s penis. ‘If it is not fit for the girl then it is not fit for the goat,’ was one group’s slogan. No one remembers the boy’s name. The father was never charged or sentenced, the police tended to turn a blind eye when it came to Druze and honour crimes.

  ‘What’s the point of having a Druze friend, if y
ou can’t make this go away?’ I asked, as Wael walked past flashing the ‘OK’ sign with his fingers.

  In Lebanon, the ‘OK’ sign means ‘you’re in trouble’.

  ‘I’ll take care of it, son,’ said Basil, punching Wael halfheartedly on his shoulder.

  Mr Malik discussed Al Maari in class, a blind, vegetarian, recluse of a poet who was known as a heretic in the golden age of Islam. When I looked over to where Serene would normally sit in class, I found an empty seat, and when I looked back ahead, I saw Mohammad biting his lip to keep himself from laughing out loud.

  Halfway through class, I spotted a tall, balding man pacing outside the window. I gestured to Basil who gave me a wink.

  Mr Malik said that Al Maari’s epitaph read: ‘This is what my father has wrought upon me, and I have wrought this upon no one.’

  ‘What do you think that means, Najjar?’ asked Mr Malik.

  ‘That life is hard, sir,’ I responded.

  ‘Not death?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘Sir,’ interrupted Basil, ‘am I right in assuming that Al Maari’s words were conceived of when he was still alive?’

  Mr Malik shook his head and let out an exasperated sigh which was also a wheeze and which, due to the Arabic teacher’s physique, appeared to give off the impression of a large deflating balloon.

  ‘Yes, Abu Mekhi, you are right in assuming that the dead do not speak, or write back or conceive of any words whatsoever. Is there a point to this?’

  ‘None, sir.’

  The bald man was now lighting his fifth or sixth cigarette and it soon became clear that Basil’s attempts at prolonging class were not going to yield any results beyond possibly angering Mr Malik further. This was proving counterproductive. He and I would have to deal with two fully grown angry men instead of one.

  ‘Sir?’ persisted Basil. ‘Do you think that Al Maari would have had a different take on life if he had not been blind, and his face ravaged by smallpox, and a vegetarian?’

  ‘Do I believe that Al Maari would have perceived of life differently if he had lived a different life? Yes, son of life, I do. Yes.’

  Mr Malik slammed his book shut and dismissed us with a mixture of disgust and dejection in his eyes.

  The balding man approached me after class and extended his hand. He introduced himself as Serene’s eldest brother, and told me that he wasn’t going to chop my penis off if that was what I was afraid of.

  ‘We were just pretending.’

  ‘I know,’ he said, leaning against the wall, ‘but you should be more careful, it is not every day that a man pretends to have sex with a Druze girl and gets to keep his dick.’

  ‘It won’t happen again,’ I said, with my hands pressed hard against one another.

  ‘I’m counting on it,’ he said, pulling at his earlobe.

  Mr Malik then burst out of class, his gut hanging over his belt, with Basil close behind him. His forehead dripped with sweat and his sleeves had been rolled up, as they always were, except that he had rolled them up with more purpose on this occasion.

  ‘Don’t touch that boy’s penis,’ shouted Mr Malik, from across the hallway, pointing his finger straight at Serene’s brother.

  ‘I wasn’t going to.’

  ‘You said he was going to chop it off,’ said Mr Malik ambling towards us, but turning his head to look at Basil.

  ‘I assumed he would, wouldn’t you?’ asked Basil.

  ‘Are you sure?’ asked Mr Malik, standing face to face with the much taller man.

  ‘If I wanted it off, it would already be off.’

  ‘Where’s Serene?’

  ‘That’s none of your business,’ said Serene’s brother running his fingers through his beard.

  ‘She belongs in class.’

  ‘She belongs where her father says she belongs.’

  I missed Serene.

  ‘Do you know who I am?’ asked Mr Malik.

  ‘Do you know who I am?’ asked Serene’s brother.

  ‘Go near this boy again, and you will have the entire armed militia of the SSNP at your door.’

  For a week, I would look at Serene’s empty seat then at Basil and receive a shrug of the shoulders. It was the month of Ramadan again. Mohammad was fasting, Wael was eating and Basil was smoking. The portrait of the president had been taken down, he had been ousted after being accused of ‘raping Lebanese democracy’. The presidential seat was left vacant and so was the place where the portrait had been.

  ‘You know it is a sin, right?’ asked Mohammad, raising an eyebrow and staring up at me from his seat on the wooden green bench.

  ‘What is?’ I asked, biting off a chunk of Cadbury Fruit and Nut which I had stored in my back pocket.

  ‘Having sex with an unmarried girl. An unmarried girl from another religion, let’s not forget.’

  ‘The problem with you Muslims around Ramadan is that when you eat less, you talk more,’ said Basil, lighting another cigarette.

  ‘Did you know,’ said Wael, ‘that the moon moves three centimetres away from the Earth every year?’

  ‘What’s your point?’ asked Mohammad.

  ‘What will Muslims do in billions of years when the moon is so far away? Who’s going to be able to tell when it is Ramadan and when it isn’t.’

  ‘I’m talking about a sin. That doesn’t depend on the moon’s distance from the Earth.’

  ‘He was pretending,’ said Wael, turning to study my expression, ‘he didn’t actually have sex with her, did you?’

  ‘Wael’s worried he’ll be the last virgin standing in the group,’ said Basil, giving me a wink, ‘when the world ends, habibi, it will just be you and your Virgin Mary left.’

  I laughed at this and Mohammad did too. I spat out the raisins and nuts. I liked the process of sucking on the chocolate until it melted away in my mouth then spitting the rest out.

  ‘Because you were the king of sex in one of your previous lives, were you Basil?’ asked Wael.

  ‘In this life and the previous ones. Who do you think invented the Kamasutra?’

  ‘Bullshit. Name one girl you’ve slept with,’ said Wael.

  ‘Paulina.’

  ‘Paulina?’

  ‘Paulina the Polish prostitute.’

  ‘Paulina?’

  ‘And Marta.’

  ‘Who’s Marta?’

  ‘They call her Marta the Moldavian man-eater.’

  ‘Is she Moldavian?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘How will you confront your creator about all of this?’ said Mohammad, resting his chin on his hand.

  ‘I’ll say I used protection.’

  Ms Iman came walking towards us with her hands in her pockets. She nodded her head in the direction of the other boys and placed her arm around my shoulders. Wael gave me the ‘OK’ sign. She looked at me without saying a word, then ushered me forward.

  ‘I know that you and Serene, the Druze girl, are friends,’ she began, as we walked away from everyone within earshot. ‘Have you spoken to her recently at all?’

  ‘No,’ I said.

  ‘Do you know if she will be returning to school?’

  ‘No,’ I said.

  ‘Did she say anything before leaving?’

  ‘No,’ I said.

  ‘I know that this is a difficult time for you too. If you need to talk,’ said Ms Iman.

  I could see Mr Malik looking at his feet as we passed him by. He was standing outside his class, cross-armed, listening closely to a conversation, not ours. I waved to him and he nodded his head. When I saw him next in class, I waved to him and he nodded again. Even after he was sacked for his remark in class about riding a student’s mother as opposed to his old motorbike, I spotted him hobbling along on Hamra Street a few times, left leg first then right leg encircling it, and I waved and he nodded.

  ‘Are you going to call in my parents?’ I asked.

  ‘Do you want me to?’

  ‘No.’

  Ms Katerina walked over to
Mr Malik. I smiled at her and she smiled back. She did not seem to acknowledge Ms Iman. I wondered if in the morning she would lay on her back and put her legs up and pull her jeans onto her waist with gravity on her side, or if she would roll the pair of jeans up and then slip her legs through one after the other. I wandered if she prepared her clothes the night before and put them on a chair next to her bed so that she can get up and throw them on in the morning. I wandered if she took her bra off before she went to bed, or if someone took it off for her.

  ‘The truth is, we haven’t heard from her or her parents, and we are getting a bit worried,’ Ms Iman turned on her toes and placed both her hands on my shoulders. ‘You are not a child anymore, and this is a serious matter.’

  ‘I did not know it would be such a big deal,’ I said, looking over my shoulder.

  Ms Iman laughed, but it wasn’t the polite laugh she had reserved for the Don’s occasional crack or the punctual laugh which indicated she had seen or heard enough of a student or even the emergency laugh which she had in place in case anyone accused her of not having a sense of humour. The laugh was loud and unrestrained, not unlike Serene’s in the toilet of the Shipman’s Crew. She removed her glasses and wiped them with her top, then she scrubbed her eyes with her knuckles and put her right hand on my neck.

  ‘The Don used to say that the two biggest deals in the region today are sex and religion, and unfortunately for us, they don’t get along very well,’ said Ms Iman, taking a step back and pursing her lips, ‘but I don’t have to tell you that, do I?’

  ‘No,’ I said.

  ‘Will you be attempting to contact her?’

  ‘No,’ I said.

  ‘Do you still want to be an astronaut?’

  ‘No,’ I said, then, ‘maybe.’

  My mother paced back and forth. My father sat on the comfortable couch looking at the floor, the answer to all his problems lay perhaps in one of the books scattered across the living room, in that undecipherable grand pattern which he alone could make sense of.

  As it turned out, Ms Iman had called my parents. My mother glared at me then resumed her pacing.