Between Beirut and the Moon

by A. Naji Bakhti

  I spotted Nadine amongst the stars and she was with a Christian boy with a cross the size of Dr. Antoine’s swimming pool hanging around his neck. I nodded.

  Nadine came over and I asked how she was. She said she was fine. She looked fine. I said I was fine too. She did not ask. She said she was glad to see me.

  There was a change in her smile which I did not recognise. Not that she smiled. But I imagined that she had, and I still could not recognise it.

  ‘The nose,’ I shouted.

  ‘I had an accident,’ she said.

  ‘While doing a cannonball?’

  ‘What?’ she asked, pretending to lean in but ensuring she kept sufficient space between us.

  She wore a loose, silk Bordeaux dress which rose above her knees and would have flapped behind her had there been any wind. Instead it hung from her shoulders and tickled her virescent thighs which glistened from the light reflected off the pool and off her champagne glass and my Almaza and the towering pole and the parting stars and off the cross around the Christian boy’s neck and the bartender’s eyes and mine.

  The Christian boy, whose navy-blue tie was still tightly knotted around his thick neck, whispered three words in her ear. What-an-asshole or I-love-you. It could have been either.

  Christian boys wore navy-blue ties. Muslim boys wore carpet-red ties. It was an unspoken nationwide agreement.

  I pointed my Almaza at the resort pool.

  ‘Cannonball,’ I said.

  My stomach felt heavy with food and beer. I pinched my forearm.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Cannonball,’ I shouted.

  The bottle flew out of my hand and into the pool. Nadine took two steps back.

  ‘I can’t hear you the music is too loud,’ she said caressing her eyelashes with her index finger, then, ‘congratulations.’

  ‘You too.’

  It was the same tone with which Ms Iman had uttered her ‘congratulations’, reserved, almost apologetic. Perhaps both of them had believed at the time that I had lost more than I had gained and they were caught between having to offer their commiserations and their congratulations all at once.

  In the distance, Mohammad and Wael stood side by side with their feet in the water staring out into the pitch-black night of the sea. Beirut might as well have burned behind them. Cranes rose into the moonlight and dwarfed the palm trees beside the escalating Tower of Dreams II. The music blasted so deafeningly into the sky that I feared the future residents of the tower would be jolted awake. Wael had his arm around Mohammad’s neck and Mohammad had his arm around Wael’s waist, and their legs were spread apart and their hips thrust forward and their slim fit, striped, black pants pulled down to their knees. And though I could not have heard it that night, there echoed the unmistakable sound of piss coming together with sea water.

  ‘Nadine,’ I shouted after her, cupping my hands so that my voice would carry further, ‘you deserve better.’

  They were halfway across the bridge when they heard my raspy voice. I meant that she deserved better than her father, better than that day by the swimming pool and the Roman columns, better than whatever accident which had resulted in the irreversible alteration to her smile. The Christian boy did not understand this.

  He turned around forcefully and made his way towards me. Nadine held the sleeve of his shirt but he pulled it away. His upper lip thinned and retreated into his mouth as he made his way forward.

  ‘I was not referring to you, George,’ I said, backing into the waist-high metal railing on one side of the bridge.

  His name was not George. This angered him further.

  He flicked his floppy hair to the side and seized my creased shirt in one swift move. His teeth came together as if he were biting off the head of an ant.

  In the time it took for his fist to connect with my eyebrow, I realised that it was an easy enough mistake to make. I reasoned that it could be imminently resolved were there enough time to resolve it and had the music not been so loud and the bridge so wet and slippery and my left eye so warm and soaked in blood.

  I pushed myself backwards, over the railing and into the gently lit pool. As I fell back, I glanced another star which I believed I had not counted before and I was gripped by the fear that I had made a grave error in failing to account for the twinkle of the stars.

  I shook Ms Iman’s right hand coldly and snatched the certificate from her left hand, without looking into her eyes. She had dubbed us ‘the graduating class of heroes’ presumably because the vast majority had managed to avoid getting ourselves shot or blown up in the intervening years between the Israeli bombardment of Beirut and our own graduation. Doubtless there were many such classes of ‘heroes’. I suspected that she had known about the extent of Mr Malik’s influence over Basil throughout. She had done nothing and I held that against her for the duration of the ceremony, and for the rest of her life. Mr Malik resigned himself to the fact that I was never going to speak to him again, though I doubt that it mattered much to him. In the final few months of class, he would repeatedly call out my name for recitation and I would repeatedly ignore it. He did this until the final class of the year, never once telling me off for my deliberate waywardness.

  The first time I ran into Mr Malik on Hamra Street, two weeks after graduation, it was dark and Sabah could barely see the cars beneath her. I did not wave to him and he did not nod. I walked straight past him, picking up the pace as I approached his round, limping figure.

  ‘I did not make him go,’ he shouted after me. ‘He wanted to go. It was his idea.’

  It was not a shout in anger. His voice was calm but loud. I should have walked, but I figured I owe him something. After all, I thought, what if he had never thrown his sizable figure at my mother’s feet and begged her to stay on that plane? I never thought that I owed him my life in any way, but a ‘listen’. I owed him a listen. But I was wrong about that too, looking back. I suspect I misunderstood my mother’s story at the time. She had already made up her mind to stay.

  ‘I won’t tiptoe around this. It is not my style. I’ll say it straight. It’ll be best for all concerned if you were to leave the country, Mr Najjar,’ he continued, ‘I say this to you out of concern for your well-being. Abu Mekhi – Basil – would have agreed. Adel is not a stable boy.’

  The massive, uneven figure of Mr Malik appeared, for the first and only time I can recall, to be uncertain how to proceed.

  ‘It seems he has gotten it in his thick head that he has some unfinished business with you. Something you said to him apparently about a Crusader raping his grandmother? He just will not get it out of his head. I mean of all the things…’

  I nodded. Some part of me enjoyed watching him flounder to explain that my life was in some danger, that he was powerless to prevent this and that, though he would never utter those words, he was sorry for his role in the way things had turned out.

  ‘Basil could talk to him. Calm him down whenever it was necessary. I don’t know how he did it. I have tried. But with Abu Makhi gone, I cannot guarantee your safety. Adel is a troubled boy.’

  I nodded again. This revelation changed nothing for my part. I had already made up my mind, with the help of my mother and Arak, to leave the country and Mr Malik’s words had little effect on my resolve. The tickets had been booked and arrangements had been made.

  ‘He might be off to Syria soon, but there is no way of knowing how soon. And he’s only a boy really, barely sixteen.’

  I stared at Mr Malik without blinking and my eyes burned and I clenched my fists inside my pockets, and ground my teeth. He fell silent for a few seconds.

  ‘The manuscript,’ he said, clearing his throat as if taken aback by his own words. ‘We had always said that we would write a revolutionary book together, your father and I. To start revolutions. And finish them. Back when he was still SSNP. Back when we were both students of the Don.’

  ‘But do keep writing,’ he said, starting a thought which he had not fully formula
ted in his head and so abandoning it midsentence. ‘I read your father’s article about being Lebanese, a few years back. It was a good article, I thought. I meant to tell you this at the time.’

  After that, I would wave to him and he would nod. I did this to keep him from uttering any more words in my direction. I felt that if I acknowledged him early and without any visible angst across my face, then I might avoid any further exchange between us. It was a meek position, I suppose, but the realisation that Basil and not Mr Malik was directly responsible for my father’s injury, had knocked much of the defiance out of me. Amongst the people you loathe, there are those upon whom you might wish the most permanent of deaths but not desire to see die, and there are those whom you would desire to see die but wish a most speedy recovery. I was never sure to which category Mr Malik belonged.

  I went back for my father’s chequered tie. When the party was over, and the music had died down, I walked past the inebriated young men and women in one another’s arms, or lying flat on their stomachs or their backs, clinging to a bottle or a glass, or a plastic bag into which they had emptied the previous contents of a bottle or a glass, or else floating dizzily in the dimly lit pool into which they had also unloaded. The smell of piss and vomit overpowered that of the previously impenetrable airborne cocktails of sambuca and tequila. Shards of glass cracked under the soles of my formal black shoes. It was as if the Israeli army – and not a rabid group of sexually volatile Lebanese teenagers – had made its way through the beach resort. My steps felt heavier, due in no small part to the sticky cocktail/puke laden floors and my soaked trousers, but also steadier. The fall from grace into the chlorinated water had done me well.

  The tie itself had a noticeable, finely shaped shoe mark, an oversized man’s, but remained otherwise unscathed, miraculously immune to the stench of the now ruined beach resort. It was still on the floor by the bar where I had dropped it at the beginning of the night without intending to go back for it. I wore that same tie to my father’s funeral many years later. I liked the symbolism, the coming full circle, the wholeness, the completeness of it. I had not intended it this way, but it struck me as a worthy gesture on the day of the interment and I went with it. I said to myself: if I find it, I’ll dust it off and wear it, and if I do not then its understandable disappearance will be a sign that it was a ridiculous idea to begin with, born of a misplaced and belated bout of sentimentality. But I found it.

  In spite, or rather because, of my father’s stubborn protestations, I had made my way back to Beirut not long after that phone call from my mother, at his sick bed. And despite the fact that I had never divulged the conversation between myself and Mr Malik to my father, his insistence that I never return to Beirut grew stronger with every year. I often wondered whether he later had a similar conversation with the Arabic teacher himself, or whether it was mere instinct which guided his thinking. The moment he passed away, the weight of his words seemed to lift, and I was able to reinterpret his requests in such a way as to suit my own peace of mind. I had found it difficult to book a ticket to Beirut while he, with his increasingly sparse breaths, urged me not to. But I soon came to the conclusion that it is a simple thing to mask your own thoughts with the voice of a deceased loved one, and so bless in their name what they would have cursed in their life.

  Strange men would hug me and cry, or pronounce that my father was a decent man, a good man who did – had done – good things for good people in good silence, knowing that all will be revealed in good time. It was essentially a litany of mechanics, Saeed and a few dishevelled, once familiar faces (Abu Abbas, Dr. Takkoush, even Mr Malik in a curious sunglasses and oversized charcoal black suit combination, etc.) I say men, because I never saw the grieving women, including my mother and sister who sat in a separate, smaller, room and received the condolences from strange women who must have, I presume, also pronounced that my father was a good man who did good things, etc. Apart from that external, omnipresent weight of grief, several thoughts flickered, with various levels of gravity, through my mind on the day as I stood beside my uncles at the mosque’s comfortably spacious reception hall, hugging and kissing strange men. The first thought was how dry my throat was, and how much I thirsted for a gulp of water.

  This first thought was accompanied by a sense of guilt, which soon subsided and began to resemble not shame exactly but a mild, self-aware embarrassment, the sort felt by conscientious rich kids when their parents flaunt their wealth in front of their less materially endowed friends. The second was not so much a thought as an image of the remains in five years’ time, ten years’ time, fifteen years’ time and so on. This I countered, or learned to counter, with the image of my father in his forties smiling and winking to himself or scratching his ear with the car keys. The third was a wallowing sense of self-pity and utter loneliness which I like to think was uncharacteristic, but cannot say with certainty.

  This last sorry state of mind was, I believe, not helped by the fact that my father wasn’t there beside me to receive the condolences of strange men at his funeral. And nor were my mother and sister for that matter, with whom, needless to say, I wanted to be most. It was true that I had hardly spoken to him over the past ten years since I had left for London, and that as it so happened we had very little left to say to one another towards the end, but I had still expected him to be present on such occasions as this. The fourth was twenty years’ time, twenty-five years’ time and thirty years’ time. The fifth was Basil. The sixth was how much facial hair my uncles had managed to produce over the days since my father’s death, compared with my own wispy beard which still did not resemble that of my father. The seventh was how hot it was that day. The eighth was how cold. The ninth was how barbaric the whole ritual was of having to wash the naked remains of my father before his interment. How cold.

  And why had my mother yielded to my uncles’ requests to give him a ‘proper Muslim’ burial when he was never, nor had he ever aspired to be, a proper Muslim? And what were the words to the Fatiha prayer? And where would my Christian mother eventually be buried? Not beside him.

  And would she even want to be? And had they not spent an entire lifetime quarrelling and throwing all manner of print in anger across a coffin-sized, book-infested, smoke-filled apartment? And, Jesus-Mohammad-Christ, would that loud obnoxious man of the cloth shut his yapping mouth so that I could think for just one second? The tenth was forty years’ time, forty-five years’ time. The eleventh was my own mortality. The twelfth was the passage of time and wounds. The thirteenth was Heraclitus and his river and stepping in it twice. The fourteenth was water, and thirst. The fifteenth, I cannot remember. The sixteenth was the theory that if you toss an infant into a swimming pool he’ll come out the other side kicking. And on and on.

  And the seventeenth was my grandfather Adam’s funeral some years before and had my father not shed a tear then? And eighteenth was the time he and I visited my grandfather’s grave alone, and how he had filled a gallon of water from a nearby cistern to the rim and doused the tombstone and the ground with it, splashing his khaki trousers and my white shirt in the process.

  And nineteenth was I think he had cried, shed a tear or two then, and read the Fatiha too with the wrinkled but not calloused palms of his hands open before him, the battered pages of an unread book, and placed roughly at waist height before making as if to wash his face with imaginary water. And twentieth, why had he never taught me how to recite the Fatiha or performed it in front of my mother and sister. And twenty-first, Buddhism. And twenty-second, I looked over at my uncle Gamal whose round and formidable shoulder was now pressed against my own, and who despite his slightly less rotund figure and marginally less plump cheeks still vaguely resembled Buddha himself. And twenty-third, I think I smiled sparingly which made me thirst all the more.

  BEIRUT INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT

  Gone were the days when people would have to sit on broken, plastic chairs in a tattered cafeteria awaiting their loved ones arriving from Franc
e or Germany or England or Brazil or Canada or the USA, or lean on rusted rails to wish them a safe journey back to wherever they came from while they smoked their Cedars or Viceroys or Gauloises or Marlboroughs. This cafeteria was bold and new and knowingly charged extortionate prices for a bottle of Tannourine and a croissant. The airport was renamed Rafic Harriri Beirut International Airport after the assassinated prime minister and former millionaire businessman who had, with some personal financial benefit, pushed for the rebuilding of the airport.

  My mother stubbed out her Marlborough when news broke that the prime minister had been assassinated only metres away from the defunct St. George Hotel by the Mediterranean. The windows rattled and the books edged forward, and the chandeliers swung and my father cast the newspaper aside and turned on the TV. This was before the Israeli bombardment and Monseiur Mermier and the Don and the White American and Adel. The aftermath of the car bomb was broadcast live. There were burnt, scorched bodies everywhere, cars on fire. The cameraman spotted a man ablaze, he was still alive and kicking around trying desperately to put the fire out or kill himself. A reporter rushed past his cameraman, swearing loudly and audibly. He took off his coat and placed it around the burning man and pushed him to the ground.

  I was too young to truly understand most of this and my mother covered my eyes with her soft hands at first, then she reached for a tissue and began to wipe her own tears.

  ‘He was so young,’ said my mother, caressing my four-year-old sister’s hair. She had been sleeping for at least an hour, her head resting on my mother’s lap and the rest of her small body stretched across that comfortable couch in the living room.

  ‘Not that young,’ said my sister.