Between Beirut and the Moon

by A. Naji Bakhti

  ‘That’s not true,’ whispered Basil through gritted teeth. They were already yellow and stained.

  ‘Worst of all is he hasn’t said anything that Antoun Saadeh himself didn’t say sixty years ago,’ said my father, flipping through the manuscript but barely touching the pages. ‘It’s the worst kind of plagiarism. The kind that doesn’t know it is plagiarism until someone else points it out.’

  Antoun Saadeh was the founder of the SSNP. His life was spent between exile and imprisonment. Eventually, he was hanged for treason after launching the armed ‘First Renaissance Revolution’ against the Lebanese government in the late forties.

  ‘It will start a revolution,’ said Basil, gasping for air.

  After Saadeh was hanged, the SSNP responded by assassinating the first Prime Minister of the Republic of Lebanon: Riad El Solh.

  Basil held my father’s stare. It was the longest I had seen Basil go without winking or smiling or sighing or puffing at his Gauloises.

  I was unsure whether he had in fact read the manuscript or sat for a summary which Mr Malik would have been more than glad to provide.

  ‘This book wouldn’t start a fire if I held it to a flame,’ said my father, ‘let alone a revolution.’

  My father played the role of disgruntled publisher well. Had his intention been to lower the agent’s demands he would have succeeded, but Basil had long ago relented. He had offered that Mr Malik pay for the costs of publication in return for the name and logo of the publishing house as well as half the earnings.

  ‘But we are the Sons of Life,’ said Basil and I looked around because I did not see the words come out of his mouth.

  This last phrase was how Saadeh had referred to members of his party. Sons of Life. And he dubbed all the ideologies which he opposed as the ‘forces of darkness’. These forces included but were not limited to: feudalism, Christian separatism, Islamic fundamentalism, Zionism and, time permitting, colonialism. There was always a lot more darkness than life.

  ‘Why does Malik want me to publish it, anyway?’ asked my father, looking up.

  Bits of the ceiling now resembled that of a brothel. The plaster had been peeling and neglected for several winters. There was even a single path which the dripping water had drawn for itself extending from the ceiling to the floor.

  ‘The Don liked you and Mr Malik respected the Don,’ said Basil, ‘he heard that you were now in the business of publishing books. He wanted this to be a joint venture.’

  This was not the reason. My father knew it.

  An ephemeral smile sauntered through his face without pausing to acknowledge Basil’s words. In its short-lived run Ninnette Publishing House, via the personage of my father, had failed to publish two books: the first for lack of funding and the second for lack of content. From the comfortable living room couch, I could see that my father was prouder of not publishing the second book than he was of not publishing the first.

  ‘Will you publish it?’ I asked.

  It was not the suspense that was killing me. I knew the answer. It was having to watch Basil struggle under the weight of my father’s retorts.

  Had Basil asked me whether I believed my father would go along with Mr Malik’s proposal, I would have persuaded him to find a publisher with a record for publishing books. Mr Malik and his odd choice of publisher baffled me, but the manner in which he had gone about it – that is, manipulating Basil to go through me in order to get to my father – sat well with my perception of the man.

  ‘Jesus Mohammad Christ,’ said my father, with an unusual, and undue, resolve. This was not the almost intuitively dismissive Jesus Mohammad Christ of old. This one was a different breed.

  ‘What?’ asked Basil.

  ‘Listen to me, son,’ said my father, holding Basil’s chin between his thumb and index finger. ‘When you see this man next, run in the other direction. And keep running. He won’t catch you. He’s got a bad leg.’

  That my father had felt the need to point out Mr Malik’s leg struck me as odd, even at the time, before everything else that would happen afterwards. Possibly, my father thought that Basil was so blind to Mr Malik’s tricks that he would not have noticed his bad leg. Or maybe he derived a certain pleasure out of noting that this man, whom he disliked, was in some way disadvantaged.

  ‘You’ve got it all wrong,’ said Basil, pushing my father’s hand away, ‘I volunteered to bring the manuscript to you.’

  ‘He’s a war relic,’ said my father. ‘He lives for war. The entire party is a war relic.’

  ‘You’re mistaken, you’ll regret this,’ said Basil, now shaking.

  And with those words came the end of Ninnette Publishing House, though neither I nor my father knew this at the time.

  He stood up and made to reach for the manuscript but my father banged his fist twice in quick succession against the stacked pieces of paper. The first time his fist connected with the manuscript it rose as if insulted by the gesture and a few papers were sent flying across the room. The second time was more final and the towering blocks of literature by the door threatened to tumble.

  ‘He’s a pimp,’ said my father, looking Basil straight in the eyes, ‘a crippled pimp.’

  ‘I’m telling him.’

  I never fully knew why my father so despised Mr Malik. He never disclosed this to me or to anyone for that matter, so far as I know. When I think of the article I wrote soon after the Don’s death and how Mr Malik used that as a tool with which to insult my father, I feel a measured sense of guilt. Though, even then I believed the matter was much larger than me and my article. I suspected my father saw in Mr Malik everything that was wrong with his Lebanon and I suspected Mr Malik saw in my father everything that was wrong with his. It could have been just that: former members of the same party, now permanently in opposition. Though up to that point, I had not yet been told about Mr Malik’s involvement in my parents’ wedding nor that long journey back on the plane from Cyprus.

  T-54 AND OTHER STORIES

  ‘How shall I explain my war to you, my son? I am too old to play now but let us start a game of hide and seek. Do you remember that one? Rest your arm against the palm tree there, and your forehead against your arm. Close your eyes, while the war goes to hide, and count aloud: one year, two years, three and, then, fifteen. Where did they go? You want to open your eyes now, but you dare not, because you cannot feel the trunk of the palm tree you once leant against or the promenade on which you stood. And even that little piece of the Mediterranean which you and your friends used to frequent is gone. And now you don’t want to play anymore, and now you shout and now scream and stamp your feet and now you wish you had never closed your eyes. You thought it was just your turn and that it would pass. And now it has.’

  My father wrote that article the night after he had walked back home across Hamra Street with his rolled-up certificate in his back pocket. He did not know that he would have a son. That night, after Iftar, Uncle Gamal went out for the traditional fireworks to celebrate the end of Ramadan with the boys in the neighbourhood. My father remained seated by the dining room table long after the plates had been cleared. He wrote first about love, inspired by Abdel Halim Hafez’s songs, but he said it seemed disingenuous.

  Abdel Halim Hafez was an Egyptian actor and singer in the seventies, dubbed the dark-skinned nightingale, and famous for his unique voice and on-screen charisma. At the time, my father sported the very same oily haircut: hair parted to the side, with the fringe pushed backwards. When Abdel Halim died, aged forty-eight, millions attended his public funeral and four women threw themselves off the balcony.

  Then my father wrote about the joy of success, also inspired by one of Abdel Halim’s songs, but that too seemed insincere. Then he turned off the radio, and Abdel Halim fell silent. He listened to the fireworks and he wrote about the war, and he knew that this was his voice, not Abdel Halim’s.

  I was in bed when I heard the first few shots being fired. I heard them in my dreams first. I saw th
em piercing Alana’s half-naked body. I saw her purse her lips and widen her eyes and curse Beirut. She said that this would never have happened in Montreal, as we lay in the sand.

  It was almost summertime again and I had insisted on using the air conditioner that night even though it had rained not two nights before. I had not seen Alana since that evening on the Octo-bus. I had asked her if she was going back to Montreal and she said she had got used to sunrises after all.

  My mother said they were fireworks. She reached for the volume control of the TV set and turned the knob down. My father did not say anything. He looked up at the ceiling, or through it. My sister, who came running into the living room after me, said she did not think they were fireworks. It did not sound like joy, it sounded like anger.

  Armed militiamen from the militant Hezbollah had taken to the streets backed by the SSNP and Amal with their AK-47s and RPGs. Opposing parties, the Future Movement and the Lebanese forces, had formed their own token militias too and armed them hastily but they stood very little chance. The army also gave it a go. Soldiers in tanks made it to the middle of Hamra Street in an attempt to try and diffuse the situation. After the first couple of hours, it became abundantly clear that this tactic was not going to yield any results. The soldiers abandoned their T-54s and left to go home to their families.

  Amal means hope.

  In the beginning, it was dark and no one said a word. Then from the dark came the voice of my father.

  ‘Where the hell is the goddamn candle?’

  The electricity was cut off and then the water and eventually after days we had very little toothpaste, or toilet paper, or Head and Shoulders. My father had dandruff and he had passed it on to me.

  My mother and sister initially sat on the edge of the bathtub, I leaned against the toilet seat and my father stood over us, cross-armed, listening intently to the sound of gunfire and RPG rockets being launched in the distance. When a bomb went off somewhere very far away, he did not look down at us and smile, like he used to, and ask us about school and deadlines and essays and football and literature and such. He grimaced, he scratched his moustache, he expanded his chest then he retracted it and, once, he sighed and the sigh went on for a couple of minutes.

  My sister reached for her toothpaste above the sink and offered it to my father. The rest of us had run out of Colgate, but my sister had her own tube of Crest. She had insisted upon this some time ago because she liked the old commercial with the Crest-coated egg immersed in a cup of acid. The Crest-coated egg did not dissolve, as opposed to the other one, and that was enough to convince my sister that Crest, not Colgate, was the answer to her probleMs My father picked it up. It was new, unopened.

  ‘Where did you get this?’ asked my father.

  My sister reached behind the sink and pulled out four or five tubes of Crest.

  ‘I wondered where they all went so fast,’ said my mother, ‘I was beginning to think you ate them all.’

  My mother and father laughed.

  There was silence. Gunshots. Silence.

  ‘You don’t know this, but your father and I almost died before you two were born,’ said my mother.

  My mother told us the story of how she and my father almost died before we were born. It was Christmas and they were hiding in the very same bathroom. There was no electricity and no heating.

  ‘It was the coldest winter I can remember,’ said my mother.

  She now had one arm around my sister and one hand on my shoulder. We crouched on the floor and leaned our backs against the white porcelain bathtub and looked up at my father. He was still standing, cross-armed. Once or twice he would rest his elbow against the washing machine or use the door handle to support his weight but he never sat down.

  ‘I wish it was winter now,’ said my sister, wiping the sweat off her neck.

  My mother had filled the bathtub with water. She reached for the hand towel by the sink, dipped it in the bathtub and placed it on my sister’s forehead.

  ‘It snowed, Fara,’ said my father.

  This was a lie. It had not snowed in Beirut since the sixties according to Grandfather Adam.

  My sister resembled a desert wanderer with the wet hand towel on her head and my father’s dirty white flannel shirt which she had turned into her summer dress and refused to take off since the shelling had begun. It smelled of newspaper too and so did the windowless bathroom.

  ‘An RPG rocket landed on the stairway right outside this house on that night,’ my mother continued.

  My mother said that she could not hear anything after the explosion. She said she could feel herself scream out empty words but that she had believed she was dead because she could not hear her voice or see my father. She had felt his hand on her face. She swatted it away instinctively. Then she felt his hand on her face again. The first thing she heard was him laughing. She asked what he was laughing about.

  ‘Jesus Mohammad Christ,’ he replied, still laughing.

  ‘What?’ she said. ‘The ringing is too loud, I can’t hear you.’

  ‘That’s what you were screaming: “Jesus-Mohammad- Christ”,’ he said, with one hand around my mother’s waist. ‘How did you come up with that one?’

  She read his lips.

  ‘I must have been thinking we need all the help we can get.’

  ‘It worked,’ he said, resting his head against my mother’s shoulder and placing his hand on her stomach.

  ‘He’s kicking,’ she said. ‘That must have scared him.’

  My mother would have a miscarriage later that week.

  ‘It happens,’ said Teta Mary at the hospital, wiping the tears away from her face and my mother’s. ‘I’ll ask the Virgin Mary for another favour.’

  There was silence again. Gunshots. Silence.

  My father leaned against the door. It was a sign that the gunshots would cease for an unspecified period of time. Some part of me believed that my father could communicate this to the militiaman, that whenever he would lean against the door, they would hear the creak of the wooden doorway and stop to listen to his stories and reminisce. That evening, for the first time, my father told us the story of the real Bilyasho, a boy named Ibrahim Bel Adel who sat two desks behind him at the Italian School in Ras Beirut. Bilyasho was the Don’s nickname for Ibrahim, who would show up to class with thick blue-rimmed glasses which complemented his curly red hair and his white, freckled cheeks. Only my father called him Bob. I think he was Druze.

  Bilyasho would regularly bring Arak to class disguised as water in a small bottle of Soha and pass it around the room until it was empty.

  ‘He took a chicken, from Abu Ibrahim’s farm, to class and set it loose,’ said my father, arching his back and snorting in a mock attempt to suppress a laugh.

  His laugh was the sound of a thousand pieces of paper being ripped at the same time.

  One morning, Bilyasho even shot fireworks through the class window from the playground which caused his classmates so much distress that some of them had to be picked up by their parents.

  ‘You think this is funny?’ said my father, imitating the Don’s scowl and addressing an invisible Bilyasho. ‘Terrifying your classmates into believing their lives are in danger. Do you think this is clever?’

  ‘No one was hurt,’ said Bilyasho.

  ‘You’re a clown. An absolute clown. And if you carry on like this, you’ll never amount to anything,’ said the Don, a vein bursting through his forehead and spit spewing from his mouth.

  Bilyasho smiled and rested his hand on the Don’s arm.

  ‘You should learn to take things lightly, Don. You’ll give yourself a stroke if you carry on like this.’ That, according to my father, is what Bilyasho said to the Don in response.

  The Don had curly black hair at the time and he would regularly slip his hands through it when feeling frustrated, or if things did not go his way. After he lost his hair, he would run his hands over his bald head but this did not seem to give him any satisfaction.

>   ‘You should learn to take things lightly, Don. You’ll lose your hair if you carry on like this,’ that, when my father retold the story, is what Bilyasho said to the Don in response.

  I heard my father tell that story several times to Monsieur Mermier imitators. After the first ending, the audience pursed their lips, those who knew the Don winced or nodded their heads knowingly and the more pious of them said ‘God rest his soul’. After the second, they laughed quietly, shook their heads and the more pious of them said ‘God rest his soul’. Monsieur Mermier alone would have raised his glass of Arak and toasted Bilyasho. The story was always about the Don, never about Bilyasho.

  My father placed his hands in his short pockets. It was sage green with stripes of grey. His shoulders arched forwards as if they were supporting the weight of his old schoolbag.

  ‘We walked back home from school that afternoon in March,’ he said, ‘the pimp snatched my backpack and ran off with it.’

  In my father’s mind, it was the last time he saw Bilyasho, running ahead with his backpack swinging from side to side. In truth, he would see Bilyasho the next day and the day after that, and almost every day for another two months or so. He confessed as much in his later years.

  Bilyasho was one of the seventeen thousand Lebanese citizens who disappeared during the civil war. His body was never found and he was never declared dead. Officially, Bilyasho is still alive today and he will live on for many years yet. He will outlive your children and your grandchildren and your great-grandchildren. And if you like you can tell them stories before they go to bed, about Bilyasho, or Pagliaccio or Ibrahim.

  My father’s backside hovered over the edge of the toilet seat, the weight of the imaginary schoolbag proving too much for his aging limbs. He soon caught himself in the act and stood up as if the toilet seat had bitten him or else stunned him into an upright position. He shook his head and crossed his arms and furrowed his eyebrows at me.

  Silence. A loud explosion.

  My mother crossed herself. Then she crossed my sister then she crossed me.