Between Beirut and the Moon

by A. Naji Bakhti

  Basil’s dark black hair turned slightly red in the sunlight. I also told him that I had seen a small whale in the sea. He said he had seen a goat.

  ‘I’m serious,’ I said, throwing myself onto the sand-covered towel.

  He said there are no whales in the Mediterranean.

  There are.

  I had only just rested my head against the sand when I heard it. A guttural screech emanating from what I knew was the other end of the shoreline. I leapt to my feet and instantly felt Basil’s arm around my shoulder. He was both leaning against me and pulling me closer to him.

  ‘Don’t react,’ said Basil, his beer-breath in my ear.

  There along the shore, some way away, was a boy of eight or nine who was barrelling towards us, screeching, kicking sand behind him. Every few steps, he would stop to catch his breath, always resuming his gallop with the same visceral cry and a rigid clenched fist in the air.

  I crossed my arms to show that I was unfazed.

  ‘I slapped him,’ said Basil, maintaining his gaze.

  ‘What?’

  I uncrossed my arms.

  ‘I slapped that boy twice. Knocked him right off his feet in front of all his little friends. Don’t react, son of life.’

  The boy bent over to catch his breath again then raised his same fist in the air and willed himself forwards, his voice commanding the attention of everyone at the beach except for the seagulls.

  ‘I called his mother,’ continued Basil, ‘I meant to apologise. She asked me what he had done wrong. I said nothing. She said he must have done something wrong. And I said he had not. And she said she was going to punish him again when he gets home.’

  ‘She’s going to beat him.’

  ‘She said she would make him bleed.’

  ‘He doesn’t even know it.’

  ‘He knows.’

  Basil’s eyes were urging the boy, pleading with him not to give up. He explained that the boy, Moustafa, had asthma which was why it was taking him so long. As he drew closer we could see that his fist, unretracted since his last stop, was covered in fresh, glistening blood. I began to take one step towards the boy but felt the weight of Basil’s pull.

  When Moustafa did finally reach us, the sun had set and he could barely breathe. We washed his face in lukewarm water and patted him on the back. I tried to clean his wound but he would not unclench his fist and instead squeezed harder which caused the blood to gush forward. Then, without further warning, he lashed out at Basil, scratching and kicking any part of him he could get a hold of, smattering Basil’s shirt in red. Basil lowered himself to his knees so that he was almost level with Moustafa, who then unclenched his bloodied fist and rammed a jagged piece of broken glass into the slight gap below Basil’s cheekbone.

  Basil sat on the sand, hunched forward with his feet in the water and his now off-white/ burgundy shirt rolled up and pressed against his cheek. I had spent the evening on the Octo-bus – the Octopus Summer Camp’s official choice of transportation – alongside Alana, dropping the children off and explaining to their parents exactly what had happened. Then apologising. A scuffle had broken out immediately following Moustafa’s concealed attack. Basil had chucked Moustafa in the air and landed him half a metre away and the kids had then rushed towards Basil kicking and screaming, accompanied by Alana. Most of the parents had not been too concerned. One or two mothers shook their heads or hugged their children a little tighter and asked when we would be picking them up tomorrow. A few told us off then insisted that the culprit – Basil – resign, which we assured them he would do. As soon as the last of them had been returned to their parents, Alana declared that she never wanted to see me or my psychotic friend again. I protested my innocence briefly without conviction. Then I said that I would quit, if she wanted me to, and requested that the bus driver drop me off back at the beach where I knew Basil would still be.

  ‘Where the fuck were you?’ he asked, scowling.

  My eyes slowly adjusted to the absence of light as I made my way towards his huddled figure.

  ‘Dropping off the kids you nearly murdered,’ I said, grabbing his head with both hands and tilting it back to get a better view of the damage to his face.

  He slapped my hands away, and blood dripped onto the sand.

  ‘I should have given Moustafa’s mother another call,’ he said, running his blood-stained hand through his hair. ‘She would have finished the job for me.’

  ‘Did she say anything?’ he asked, after dabbing at his cut for a while.

  ‘She wasn’t there.’

  I bent over without sitting and extended the palm of my hand. He placed a single twenty thousand lira note.

  ‘Didn’t work out between you and Tariq Bin Ziyad?’

  I often wonder if it was he or I who had first compared Alana to the famed conqueror, and whether I had reimagined our encounter based on Basil’s remark soon after or my own impression of her at the time. I sometimes believe that I mentioned the resemblance to him just before Moustafa came running at us, but then I remember that I could not have because I had barely rested my head when I heard the boy’s cry of war.

  ‘There were two of those.’

  He shrugged.

  ‘I’m short on cash. My adulterous bastard of a father doesn’t store it in his wallet anymore,’ he said, flipping the crunched up shirt and dabbing at his cut again. ‘I think he caught on after the missing picture.’

  Behind us rose the glass Tower of Dreams I, in which it was rumoured resided several celebrities including former Miss Lebanons and wealthy Saudi oil merchants and a number of gluttonous politicians and their business associates. Hidden behind the Tower of Dreams I stood a bomb shelter which had been turned into a brothel and an old bakery which would soon open its doors and allow the smell of manouche and cheese and thyme and olive oil to overtake that of the sea.

  ‘Why didn’t he confront you about the money you already stole then?’ I asked, placing my hands in my pockets.

  ‘The pimp’s afraid I’ll tell my mother about the girl in the picture if he confronts me about anything,’ he said, reaching into his own pocket and producing the picture. ‘I’m dead certain he’s having an affair after this.’

  The photograph was smeared with his blood. He raised it up in the air, holding it between his thumb and index, then he gave it a flick with his middle finger and let it drop into the water.

  ‘All those Gauloises, all those olive, lime-flavored condoms, all that cash, and the pimp notices when I take a picture from his wallet,’ said Basil, reaching for his Gauloises and placing one between his lips.

  As Basil shifted his weight in the sand, the moonlight gently brushed against his bicep and I could see for the first time the reason why he had not taken off his white shirt for the entire day, nor delved into the sea. It was a tattoo of the spinning swastika of the Syrian Social Nationalist Party on his biceps. It appeared to be fresh and raw and protruded, as if it were about to leap out of his left arm and spin wildly out of control.

  ‘What’s that about?’ I asked, flicking my head in the direction of the tattoo.

  ‘Nothing,’ he said, covering it with his bloodied shirt, ‘it’s the “whirlwind”.’

  He chucked his transparent green lighter at my chest. I caught it and lit his cigarette for him. I had not held a lighter since Don Amin confiscated mine that day when my father was late to pick me up from school. The act felt natural. I instinctively knew what to do. I imagined that this was how old militiamen must feel when handed a gun.

  ‘It’s that spinning swastika on the board in Momo the paedophile’s office,’ I said. ‘Isn’t it?’

  ‘It’s the emblem of the Syrian Social Nationalist Party,’ said Basil, without flinching, ‘the “whirlwind”.’

  ‘It’s the paedophile’s swastika,’ I said.

  I held his gaze for some time as he took a puff of his cigarette.

  ‘It’s not a swastika,’ he said, baring his left arm with the cigarette dangling
between the index and middle fingers of his right hand. ‘Look here, it’s a combination of the Muslim Crescent and the Christian Cross.’

  I could not see it.

  ‘What about the Druze?’

  ‘They’re in there somewhere,’ he continued, ‘the four arms each stand for one of the party’s virtues: freedom, duty, discipline and power.’

  He attempted to trace the spinning swastika with his index finger, but the tattoo was still sore. He winced and dropped his cigarette. I picked it up, took a puff and gave it back to him. Basil covered the spinning swastika with the palm of his hand.

  Looking back, I am reminded of the old Druze saying, which I was unaware of at the time: ‘That which shields is that which is shielded. And that which is shielded is that which shields. The former is the latter and the latter is the former. There is no difference between them.’

  ‘Since when are you a fan of duty and discipline?’ I asked, coughing and slipping the lighter into my pocket.

  Basil’s mouth widened. I took this to be a smile. He tapped his hand against the wet sand gently. I took off my shoes, then my socks. I rolled them up and placed them inside my shoes then I dipped my feet in the water and allowed myself to drop back onto the sand so that I was lying right beside where Basil sat cross-legged; and he told me that the SSNP was everything he and I had been looking for. He said that they were a secular party that did not care about who you are or where you come from. He said that they did not care about ‘advancing the dogmas’ of this religious sect or that, unlike all the other political parties in Lebanon. He said that they were not Sunni or Shiite or Catholic or Druze or Maronite or Orthodox.

  ‘They’re not Lebanese, either,’ I said, reaching for his cigarette and taking another puff.

  His mouth widened once more. This time I did not take it to be a smile.

  ‘They are,’ he said, ‘they just believe in something greater than Lebanon.’

  He said that the SSNP also believed in youth.

  ‘This,’ he said, pointing to the tattoo on his biceps, ‘was designed at the American University of Beirut by students, like you and me, in secret.’

  I asked him where he had learned all this and he said, ‘Mr Malik.’ Not Momo or the paedophile or Momo the paedophile. Just ‘Mr Malik’.

  Then he gave me a light slap across the cheek and tossed his bundled-up shirt onto my face.

  Opposite the brothel, Candlelight, stood half a building. It was under construction and would rise to twenty-four floors when complete. ‘Luxury Furnished apartments for Rent/Sale’ read a large white sign. The future inhabitants of that luxury building would not take too kindly to having a brothel between them and the Tower of Dreams I. Candlelight would become Tasty and Tasty would become Two Cups and Two Cups would become Starlight, which was audacious and older generations would boast about understanding the reference. And the bakery, that would have to go too.

  A RIP IN SPACE AND TIME

  When I asked my father if he was having an affair, he said ‘no’. And when I asked him again, he said he was not. When I asked him for the third time, he said he would say he was if it meant I would stop asking him about it. I did not say anything. And he said he was.

  ‘With whom?’ asked my sister, as she sat on the comfortable couch eating her share of Bonjus vanilla ice cream.

  The two towering blocks of literature by the door had remained there undisturbed, but beside them and in front of the bookshelves, a wall of old books had been accumulating all along. At first, no one had realised what was happening apart from my father. No one believed that it was even conceivable. And by the time we caught on, the wall was already halfway up and there was very little we could do about it except avoid running into to it so that we did not have to deal with the rubble.

  The wall stood between the bookshelves and the rest of the hallway and seemed to have been erected to shield the bookshelves from the outside world, or to keep them from ever venturing out into it. It was like the Berlin Wall, except instead of the Soviets on the Eastern side, we had books. And instead of Checkpoint Charlie, we had three or four gaps in the wall through which my father would slip his hand and reach for his intended reading. Now and then, he would come up with the wrong book and chuck it back over the wall.

  ‘Madame Hafez.’

  ‘Since when?’

  ‘Jesus-Mohammad-Christ. Since the incident with the cedar tree.’

  ‘You’re a terrible human being,’ said my sister.

  ‘What’s the matter with you two?’ he asked, his face hidden behind his An-Nahar Daily.

  Had my father looked up from his newspaper more often than he did, I suspect that he would have had one of those clairvoyant, nebulous stares; eyes that see through and past you into a place where you cannot hope to go. But he rarely did.

  My sister said that she would never again climb into the room stacked with books, that he could get his own books and that she was too big now anyway.

  Every man suspects his father of having had an affair. Some have pictures of younger women or condom wrappers or an unforgiving memory, others have an uncomfortable glance or an ill-timed clearing of the throat or a cough.

  My father’s affair with books culminated in a publishing house. The publishing house was an idea which had weighed on his mind for several years, ever since his drunken conversation with Monsieur Mermier, but it was not until what I took to be his midlife crisis, that he felt confident in going through with it. He called it Ninnette Publishing House. The logo was the silhouette of a cat with a tail which resembled a question mark and his first client was Madame Hafez. Madame Hafez was now almost an octogenarian of Armenian descent. Her first name, I learned that day, was Lusine, and her real last name was Sarkissian. Her choice of Hafez was a name she’d used to shield herself from the hostility she perceived she might face in west Beirut. She had resided alone in Bourj Hammoud, the Armenian quarter in Beirut, prior to marrying the doctor and moving in with him.

  Before that, however, Lusine had travelled the Middle East. Her parents had been forced out of their homes due to the Armenian genocide in Turkey around the onset of the twentieth century. She had lived in Baghdad with her parents before the Gulf War, Mosul with her first husband before the Iraq war, and Aleppo, with her sister.

  ‘I’ve written a book about my life, Mr Najjar,’ said Lusine, pointing her arthritis-plagued finger in the direction of my father’s heart, ‘and I want you to publish it.’

  My father had insisted upon the whole family accompanying him to the first meeting. He promised us zucchini and vine leaves at my mother’s favourite restaurant, Socrates, afterwards.

  ‘It would show that I’m a family man,’ he said, ‘this business is all about impressions.’

  It did not seem to matter that Madame Hafez was the landlord and neighbour, that she had lived a single floor below our own for nearly two decades or so, and that whatever impression she had had about my father, she would have formulated some time ago.

  Madame Hafez, or Lusine, offered me a plate of Arabic sweets. I said I did not really like Arabic sweets. She produced a Cadbury bar from a drawer in the living room side table. The doctor had passed away two years before and Madame Hafez was living with her sister again, who had moved in with her recently from Aleppo. Madame Hafez’s sister said she did not feel safe in Syria anymore. She said that age had not dimmed her ability to smell a war brewing from afar. She spent her days and nights in bed, except when she felt obliged to attend to the garden/parking lot at the bottom of the building. Lately, Madame Hafez had taken on those gardening duties due to her sister’s failing health.

  The chandelier was decorated with what appeared to be crystal and hung low from the ceiling. The rest of the furniture did not go with the chandelier and made it look even more impressive than it might have otherwise been.

  ‘Have you titled the book yet?’ asked my father, sipping his Turkish coffee.

  My sister and I sat either side of my parents. I pla
ced my finger through the crochet on the couch’s armrest.

  ‘I have not finished writing it yet,’ said Madame Hafez, who had more white hair than grey, ‘I thought about titling it: Sykes-Picot and I.’

  ‘How about something more straightforward like From Armenia to Lebanon?’

  ‘That is possible.’

  ‘Or how about Through the Middle East?’

  ‘That is possible, too.’

  ‘Or how about Wars and Cities of the Middle East?’

  ‘No,’ said Madame Hafez.

  Madame Hafez then requested that the defecating cat be excluded from the cover of her book. My father explained that the cat logo would have to be included but that the dot beneath the question mark/tail could be negotiated away if she so wished. Madame Hafez placed her glasses on her nose and scrutinized the paper in front of her displaying Ninnette, the defecating cat.

  ‘I suppose,’ she said, removing her glasses, ‘if you insist.’

  She had two sets of glasses on her at all times. One hung from her neck and another was uneasily balanced on her nose. She was forever removing a pair of glasses to place the other pair on.

  My father spoke at length about how vital a book like this is, how it will change the world, how this is exactly the kind of story that literature has been lacking of late. Madame Hafez nodded along, the water in her sea blue eyes responding to the windswept charm of my father’s barren words. She may have even smiled at one point. Then my father explained that as he did not yet have the capital to invest in the book, she would have to fund the publication of the book herself but that he would ensure she got a fair portion of the earnings in return. Madame Hafez said she had some gardening to do and walked us towards the elevator.

  ‘What kind of human being are you?’ asked my sister, as my mother, father and I squeezed into the old elevator opposite Madame Hafez.

  The lift had a Vintage Otis wooden scissor gate which one had to close manually. The mirror was rusted around the edges and foggy, but it didn’t matter because the light was too dim for the mirror to be of use.