Between Beirut and the Moon

by A. Naji Bakhti

  Initially, just before informing my father of my plans regarding Syria, I told him that I wanted to be a journalist, a reporter. And I stopped there. I had learned to time my pauses to perfection.

  ‘That will do,’ said my father, his voice did not crack nor his eyes tear up. But I saw his chest heave. His words were carried on the back of one long sigh. My father’s sigh was entrenched before the birth of time, before the opening of the eras, before the pines, and the olive trees and before the grass grew. He had held his breath for the duration of space-time, and now that he had finally exhaled, he appeared smaller, his shoulders less broad, his chest less pronounced, his neck slightly thinner and even his rigid spine gave way.

  He did not mention the first Arab astronaut, he did not bring up the space shuttle or the Hubble telescope, he did not berate my flat feet. I imagine it was a peace offering.

  It was then that I said I wanted to cover Syria. I did not really; and not only because Basil was there. I never did. I had every intention of running as far and as fast as possible away from the crack of bullets piercing the air and echo of RPG rockets landing on cement and burnt flesh.

  And in any case, there were many practical and logistic problems with my hasty, makeshift plan. For one, I was not sure whether An-Nahar would hire me to report in Syria. I was also not sure whether they would have the means to smuggle me into Syria. I expected my father to pinpoint those flaws. He did not.

  Had my father not sighed, I suspect he would have found the strength to burst past my mother and sister. But he had sighed. He stopped resisting and my sister slowly unclenched her jaw, releasing his forearm from the grip of her teeth. He dropped Standing by the Ruins: Elegiac Humanism in Wartime and Postwar Lebanon. He muttered something, he cursed someone.

  There was another rip in time and space, and I saw my father, the moustache-less boy, who had emerged in the elevator momentarily to argue with Madame Hafez or Farhat. He shook his head, he stomped his feet, he ground his teeth then he scrubbed his eyes with his knuckles.

  ‘Curse this country of pimps and prostitutes,’ said my father, and his voice tailed off, ‘mother and father.’

  When he limped towards my huddled figure, he did so calmly, stepping over the hills of now stationary books without looking down. He placed his hands underneath my armpits and he lifted me against the wall. It must have taken every remaining ounce of strength he had, because I offered him no help. That was the closest I remember my father’s face ever being to mine, his flat, flaring nose almost touching my own. His unyielding hair, his thick lips, the dimple parting his chin and that moustache. It was not as full as I had always assumed it was. There were little gaps in between which he had hid well. I wondered whether, like my sister in her early years, I would fail to recognise him without his moustache.

  That night, after my father and sister had gone to bed, my mother and I sat on the comfortable couch in the living room. She made me a halloumi sandwich and I ate it. Then she made me another with tomatoes and I ate that one too. Then she took out the Arak. It was a tall and thin blue Massaya bottle. She poured me a glass.

  ‘One third Arak and two thirds water,’ she said, as the Arak turned white, ‘the ice goes in at the end. Never before.’

  Unlike my father, my mother had lost weight then gained it back then lost it again. Every autumn, her freckles would grow stronger, and fade again in the summer. Her teeth were now stained with nicotine but it did not matter because when she smiled all you could see were her dimples and the way her wide eyes instantly watered, as if mistaking the parting of the lips for a quiver.

  We talked about what it would have felt like to be in space, to walk on the moon, we talked about my grandmother, we talked about the weather and we talked about my father but only fleetingly.

  ‘He’s a human being,’ she said, biting her lip and waving her hand as if she were dismissing a fly.

  I asked her if she’d ever seen him cry.

  ‘No,’ she said softly, her eyebrows furrowed, ‘but then your grandfather never smiled.’

  And was it not better to have a father who is incapable of producing a tear than a father who is incapable of producing a smile? And maneuvered into choosing between those two mutually exclusive alternatives, I was forced to concede that, yes, it was better. Which is why, when I received the phone call from my mother, years later, describing the state of my withering father in his final days and the tears which had made their way down to his moustache, I could not but dwell on her words with scepticism. I was certain that she remembered our conversation and wondered whether this was her attempt at giving me the closure which she thought I needed.

  ‘It doesn’t mean that your father cares any less about you or your sister,’ she continued in her gentlest voice.

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Is this what this whole Syria thing is about? Getting a rise out of your father?’

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘I really do want to be a reporter.’

  ‘Not an astronaut?’

  She smiled wistfully as she said this, as if I had just conceded defeat, and she glanced up to where there were no stars and she indulged, for the last time, in that childish fantasy which it now appeared she had also allowed herself to believe in.

  ‘Did you ever regret it?’ I asked, and she understood what I meant.

  ‘They were different times, habibi. You have to remember that. Your grandfather did not know any better. Your father and I did not know any better. I did what I thought was right.’

  She told me about the time my father went to my grandparents’ apartment and asked them for my mother’s hand in marriage. My Grandfather Nabil was welcoming and gracious, as he always had been. And my grandmother was occupied but polite, she accepted the bouquet of red flowers which my father brought and placed them in a vase. Just before my father left, he remarked to my mother that he thought grandfather Nabil was receptive and that they would soon be able to marry one another. My grandfather escorted him towards the lift, kissed him on either cheek and bid him goodbye. Just after my father left, Grandfather Nabil smashed the vase against the floor and declared loudly that he forbade it.

  ‘A Muslim husband?’ said my mother, putting on her best impression of her father. ‘Muslim grandchildren?’

  My grandmother told my grandfather off for smashing the vase, but not for forbidding the marriage.

  ‘But what made you stay in your seat on the plane?’ I asked, hurriedly wiping the snot off my nose with the sleeve of my shirt.

  ‘The truth?’

  I nodded.

  ‘It was Malik, more than anything else that day. It was Malik.’

  ‘Mr Malik? Momo the paedophile?’

  ‘Don’t call him that. He is a nice and gentle man. I know things have been rocky between them since, I don’t know exactly why. I also know that he had something to do with that incident with your father and Abu Abbas and the pistol and the Honda, but I also know that he would never have intentionally harmed your father. I know it.’

  ‘Why was he there on that plane?’

  ‘We needed a witness for the marriage registration to take place in Cyprus. Malik was a close friend of your father’s, they were both members of the SSNP at the time, and he agreed to come with us. By the time your father and I got on the plane, we had already been married, and the plane was supposed to have taken off half an hour earlier but it hadn’t. Which is when that damn letter from your grandfather arrived. Your father was stunned, he just would not move. I thought he would beg me to stay, throw himself at my feet, or at least kiss my hand and tell me that he too was scared, that we had done a dangerous but brave thing together and that we love each other, which is what I thought. I thought everything would be alright in the end, I told him so, but I wanted to know that he thought this too. I was risking a lot more than he was, I wanted to know that he was going to be there for me when it mattered. But your father did not say or do a thing. He stayed there in his seat motionless, with his eyes opened wider
than I have ever seen them. I think he finally felt the weight of it, I think he went into the whole thing without really realising the burden of it, I think the letter helped hammer it home, which is the only thing that damned letter was good for anyway. And we were so young, Adam. So young. You won’t understand now, but we were. But it rocked him, that letter, and he handed it back to me and just stared blankly out the window. And it was Malik who acted on impulse. He knelt to the ground, with his bad leg, and grabbed my calf with both hands and he wept like a baby, like a little blubbering baby. The whole plane was watching us. And he begged me not to go, he said that we were very brave and that we were changing the world, that not many people could do what we did and that he knew how much your father and I loved each other, and that would never change. He was sure of it. And he said that my father would speak to me again, and never forgive himself for what he wrote. Which was true, you know. He never did, your grandfather never forgave himself.

  ‘Then Malik looked up at me with those wet round eyes and runny nose, and he did not bother to wipe his round face, and he asked me if I would please stay. For him. If I would please, please stay. For me. That’s when I looked at your father, and now I could see he had forgotten about the letter completely and he was staring at Malik in disbelief, his mouth hanging half open and his eyes narrow. And I told your father to stand up and let the poor distraught man sit in his place, which your father did without objecting. And Malik and I sat next to one another for that entire flight, and we talked about everything and we laughed and drank Ksara. The hostess kept coming over to beg us to lower our voices, but we were having none of it. And your father found a place, two seats behind mine by the window. And we kept sneaking glances back and laughing at him for the whole trip.’

  My mother was laughing, wiping her tears away. And so was I. Smoke swirled around the room.

  Then we talked about my aunt and uncle in London and she said I should go visit them. As she spoke her freckles danced, unsure of the season.

  ‘You won’t like the weather,’ she said, ‘and, you know, it’s not a coastal city.’

  ‘I know,’ I said, ‘Teta Mary always said that she felt trapped there, like she couldn’t see the end of it.’

  ‘Just follow the great river out to the coastline.’

  I expected her to be hurt; her blood ties to Beirut being thereafter indefinitely reduced to two. She was not, or if she was then she did not show it.

  The conversation went on past midnight, and by the time we were done, she, cigarette in mouth and all, had managed to turn a short visit into a student visa.

  ‘You will love it,’ she said, smiling and raising her glass of Massaya, ‘you’ll come back a proper journalist.’

  I stayed up until sunrise reading fragments of the books which had been the subject of my father’s rage and made firm contact with my forehead and ribs. I did not mind the unperturbed sweat making its way down my spine. The daylight crept in through the shutters, past the comfortable couch in the living room and into the hallway as the dust settled on the bookshelves and the piles of books on the floor. The tiles had always been cracked, and the longest one extended from the window in the living room and loosely resembled the shape of Madame Hafez’s arthritis-plagued index finger. There was a story in there that I never asked about and was never told. I sat on the hard floor coaxing the words out of my unwitting transgressors. In amongst those battered book covers, I came across Basheer Gemayel and his father the football captain, Antoun Saadeh and his forces of darkness, Habib Shartouni and his poetry, Riad El Solh and his Tarboush, the Druze and their colours, the Sufis and their dancing, the SSNP’s decorated history of assassinations, the Phalangists, the Sabra and Chatilla massacre, the Syrian regime, and others.

  I looked up from the pages of the books which smelled not of paper but of my father’s flesh to see the man himself standing cross-armed, eyes shut listening intently to the sound of pages being turned. His forearms alone were caught in a beam of unusually harsh morning light such that the hairs on the back of them appeared to blur into a black flame.

  On our high school graduation night, I did not see Basil. He had stopped attending classes but I had hoped that he would still make it to the after-party at the private beach resort anyway. Mohammad, Wael and I stretched our lean bodies across the sand. All three of us were dressed in white shirts with the sleeves rolled up to the elbows and the buttons undone down to the chest. Mohammad’s chest hair protruded through his shirt. He was always a growth spurt ahead of the rest of us. His thin, red tie still hung loosely around his neck and he held a 961 in his hand. I dropped my tie by the bar and decided to leave it there. I had taken a dislike to the chequered pattern and in any case I had borrowed it from my father who was unlikely to miss it. My mother had picked it out, my father nodded his approval without lifting his head above the newspaper.

  I balanced an Almaza on my chest, with the label now scratched off, as Wael knocked back the rest of his Beirut Beer, a recent, unimaginative addition to the market. The moon was full and it shined brighter than the spotlights at the beach and louder than the sound of the bass emanating from the bar behind us. We owned the shoreline. The pool was theirs and the sea was ours.

  Mohammad said that he was definitely in Syria, probably Homs.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The goat-worshipper.’

  Wael said that he could imagine Basil riding a goat into battle. Of the four of us, Basil had been the shortest. To Wael, from his elevated point of view, it must have seemed like Basil and the goat were about the same height.

  I dug my left hand into the sand.

  ‘He might find his way back,’ said Mohammad. ‘My father came back when everyone thought he was gone for sure. But I believed.’

  I had not had much contact with Basil since that night by the Rawshe Rock. He came to my house once and asked my mother, through the intercom, if I would like to come out and play. My mother laughed at this. I said I was not feeling well and my mother invited him to come up anyway. He declined. My mother insisted.

  ‘I made stuffed vine leaves and zucchini,’ she said, ‘you must try them. They’re Adam’s favourite.’

  ‘Another time,’ said Basil, and he must have been relieved that it was my mother’s and not my father’s voice through the intercom.

  I had not confronted him that night.

  I like to think that, when I steadied myself after my bout of Sufism, I chose not to, that I was being the bigger man, but my reaction afterwards makes that perception difficult to maintain. He must have realised, the way the smile faded from his face, that I had found him out as a thug. For a long time, I convinced myself that it was pity not fear which had kept me from confronting Basil. That I was not a coward who would smash windows and run. After all, I told myself, I was speaking to a dead man and it is petty to hold a grudge against a dead man.

  ‘Where’s your date?’ asked Mohammad, for once looking sideways not upwards at Wael.

  Wael’s date was a thirty-something-year-old woman who promptly discarded Wael the moment we arrived at the Pangea beach resort.

  ‘Where’s your father?’ replied Wael, which was so unlike him that Mohammad ended up snorting his 961 between fits of laughter and coughing.

  Wael tipped the last drop of lager down his throat. He reached for my Almaza but I snatched it away and nudged him off with my elbow.

  ‘It was never going to happen,’ said Wael, sitting up and resting his elbows on his knees.

  I exchanged quick, baffled glances with Mohammad. The Muslim pursed his lips and lifted an eyebrow. Wael looked down at the sand between his feet.

  ‘What? You sleeping with the thirty-year-old?’

  ‘You becoming an astronaut,’ he continued, ‘I sat down and calculated the odds one night. A while ago. It was not long after we were suspended from school for starting that playground revolution.’

  He paused to allow himself a sigh.

  ‘The chances of you becoming an a
stronaut are about one in twelve million. And that’s not accounting for the fact that you are an Arab.’

  I said that it was in the past now. As he spoke the thud of the bass and the whoosh of the waves blended into one indistinct din.

  ‘Adam,’ he said, ‘you are more likely to be struck by lightning, twice.’

  I knocked my head back and poured the lager into my gaping mouth.

  ‘You are more likely to win the lottery twice.’

  It burned its way down my throat. Mohammad said that astronauts don’t come from warm countries anyway.

  The outline of a man carried the outline of woman into the sea. He threw himself into the water or she threw him. Then she ran back up towards the swimming pool, across the sand, with her wet hair flickering in the night light. He stumbled after her, stopping every so often to pull up his heavy pants. The cold bottles soon turned warm and sweat stains swiftly appeared under our armpits.

  ‘Where are those mermaids you and Basil used to speak of all the time?’ asked Mohammad, lager dripping down his chin and sweat down his forehead.

  I shrugged my shoulders. Mohammad did not see this. We heard the dull thud of the bass again, glass shattering, and smelled the sambuca and the vodka but not the good stuff.

  ‘Another round?’ I asked, pushing my palms against the sand.

  I made my way across the bridge which arched over the pool and led straight to the crowded bar. The bridge was the only way to reach the bar, which was otherwise stranded in water. There was no Arak. This was not the place for it. Behind the bottles of Johnnies and Jacks and Jims, there were blue lights and red lights and green lights which shone through the glass and the alcohol and through the back of bartender’s head and out of his eyes and into mine. I closed my eyes and gripped the towering white pole which rose straight through a hole in middle of the bridge. It was cold and wet and I pushed my torso and my cheek against it. It parted the stars and I counted forty-one of them. Forty-two with the sun which I knew was there but could not see because it was too dark.