Françoise joins me.
‘Is that anisette?’ she asks, pointing with her chin towards the bulbous bottle I am expertly caressing.
‘It’s pretty close.’
I pour the clear liqueur into a small glass. I add a little bit of water to it. The glass turns a milky white.
‘That reminds me of experiments in chemistry class.’
‘Chemistry is exactly what it is – arrack converts dreariness into delight.’
I lift the glass to my nose and breathe in deeply.
‘Ah, the smell of arrack. It goes straight to your head, cleanses your mind. During the war, we were all arrack drinkers.’
‘In order to forget?’
I take small sips of my drink and click my tongue against my palate each time I swallow.
‘To forget, yes. Sometimes, when shells were falling on our neighbourhood and everyone was taking refuge in the bomb shelters, I would swill down an entire bottle of arrack. I would go out onto the balcony, throw out my arms and sing.’
‘You were crazy, my friend,’ Françoise murmurs, tapping her forehead with her index finger.
‘Alcohol denies danger. I wasn’t even aware of the risks I was taking by exposing myself to the bombs. I wasn’t thinking of anything. I was euphoric, carefree, lighthearted.’
‘It could have cost you your life!’
‘My mother would beg me to come back inside, would pull me by my shirt tails … But it was no use – I was too engrossed in the show.’
Françoise scowls:
‘What show?’
‘The rockets cutting across the sky! They looked like shooting stars, like comets. I would follow their trajectory with my finger, the golden furrows they traced, the showers of sparks that flew through the darkness and lit up part of my city. I would sing out, loud and clear, off-key, accompanying the symphony of lights.’
Françoise can’t believe it. She tosses her hair back, and in a solemn voice says:
‘Waking up must have been awful.’
‘In the morning I was back to square one. I would wake up with a hangover. Everyone would tell me: ‘You sang all night.’ And as for me, I couldn’t remember anything.’
I drink my fifth glass of arrack. My ears get hot. The terrace is reeling. The plants and the furniture come loose. Françoise is floating through the air. I am sinking. I grab onto her dress. She laughs.
Drunkards are forgiven everything, for they know not what they do.
The Long Vacation
I open the door to the café in Gemmayzé, one of Beirut’s oldest neighbourhoods. I sit down at a table and look around me and I see nothing but old men with grey hair, their collars open, spending their time whiling it away. They are either playing backgammon or cards. The waiter goes from table to table proposing narghiles. Every day it’s the same ritual – they are sinking ships. Some are widowers or are divorced, others what we call ‘confirmed bachelors’. All have as a home base this café oddly dubbed ‘Qahwat el-Azaz’ (The Glass Café), maybe because its façade is a glass wall that looks out onto the street. As you step into this tobacco-infested place it immediately becomes clear that you are disturbing these people: dozens of near-sighted eyes turn towards you, and look you over from head to toe. The ambience has not changed in ages – the café’s regulars have a few more wrinkles, that is all.
For years we were just like these men – we spent our time whiling it away. Drowning our anxiety in games. Doing what we could so the hours would pass without our noticing, under the illusion that we would find peace at the end of a game. Before the war I knew nothing about cards – I held them fanned out in such a disorganized manner that I gave my hand away every time. By the end of the war no game remained that had not revealed its secrets to me. By candlelight, we spent our quiet evenings – which they all were – in the company of the king, queen and jack. Some took up chess, others preferred backgammon. As for my mother and my aunts, they endlessly knitted hats, sweaters and mittens, so much so that they had a terrible time unloading the products of their industry.
Mornings were devoted to strolling in the countryside. The area where we had taken refuge was one of the most diverse in the Kesruan region. It offered a wide variety of trees, plants and insects that brought us happiness during the long vacation granted to us by the war. I spent hours in the fields gathering thyme – an essential ingredient for the preparation of manakich, a sort of breakfast pie – or lavender that Aunt Malaké put into little sachets to be used for perfuming closets. Thanks to my mother, I learned to call plants by their names: Rhododendron ponticum with its flowering clusters, Erica verticillata, more commonly known as ‘heather’, Convolvulus arvensis, the code name for bindweed, Ixiolirion tataricum, alias Siberian lily …
When it was nice out I picnicked with my brothers and sisters in the shade of the oak trees; I slept beneath the willow trees near the springs and the rivulets; I helped pick olives, pine cones and apples. My father worried, seeing me lying on my stomach observing ants and lizards. But my mother set his mind at rest: ‘It’s science,’ she said. ‘That’s how Konrad Lorenz got his start.’ As for my older brother, he chased flies and bees, and stalked through the yard armed with his plastic fly swatter. Every evening he diligently wrote down the results of his day’s work in a notebook: ‘thirty flies downed, seventeen bees squished’, a little bit like pilots who mark an X on their fuselage for every plane they shoot down. Occasionally he indulged in amazing experiments: he put a grasshopper and a spider together in a transparent box and devoted three hours of his time to observing the two insects’ reactions … There were also mosquitoes and butterflies which, at nightfall, came and hovered around our candles. We did not chase them away – they livened up our nights, much like the frogs and cicadas that lulled us with their croaking and chirping.
It was at that time that Le Petit Baigneur (The Little Bather) came into being. It was an apolitical weekly magazine of which I was the founder and the sole contributing writer, and whose name was a reference to a film starring Louis de Funès. Only one copy was released each week, presented in the form of a thirty-page notebook, entirely handwritten. I rented it out to my brothers, sisters, cousins and friends for the modest sum of fifty piastres. With the gold mine I pulled in by doing this I bought prizes for the lucky winners of my magazine’s contests.
Uncle Michel helped us occupy our spare time. He put on plays in the yard. Thus, under his direction, we acted out the Rahbani Brothers’ Petra, as well as Schéhadé’s The Emigrant of Brisbane and Giraudoux’s Tiger at the Gates, which were a big hit among our parents and neighbours. To get us to stretch our legs he organized some special Olympic Games with categories we could handle – track and cycling. The opening day of the Games we paraded past the audience wearing tracksuits and brandishing flags. At the close of the competition winners and losers alike were awarded chocolate medals, which they received atop a makeshift podium, to the sound of the national anthem.
‘Chéch béch!’
Seeing the café’s regulars blow into their fists and expertly roll the dice, I could not help but think about the best part of the war – if there can be anything good about a war, that is: those idle moments that it granted us, thanks to which we were reconciled with nature and with time.
The Hospital
It hedge-hops, circles around the flame, rises up into the air, then does a nosedive. Its wings catch fire. We hear them sizzle. The moth goes into a tailspin and lands at the base of the candle. Another, smaller one suddenly springs forth out of the darkness. It draws near my youngest brother and encircles him. Irritated, my brother swats at it with the back of his hand. Flustered, the moth takes refuge in the hollow of his ear.
‘Mom!’
My brother jumps up out of his seat, panicking.
‘The moth! It flew into my ear!’
He starts to cry. Stuck to his eardrum, the moth flutters. My mother is worried.
‘I’ve never heard of anything like this happening
before.’ she says, shrugging her shoulders.
She looks into his ear, tries to dislodge the moth with a Q-tip. Nothing works.
‘To the hospital!’
She takes my brother by the hand, pushes him into the car and heads for the nearest hospital. After a minute she jumps with a start:
‘What are you doing here?’
She had not seen me.
‘I’m coming with you, Mom.’
‘No one asked you to come,’ she curtly replies.
Five minutes later we arrive at the emergency room. My mother goes up to a nurse:
‘Excuse me, Miss, it’s my son – he has a …’
She does not finish her sentence. With a violent kick, a bearded militiaman has just opened the door. Followed by half a dozen armed fighters, he shoves past everyone and barges into the operating room.
‘Who’s in charge here?’ he barks.
A doctor rushes over, trembling.
‘Treat him!’ the bearded man orders, pointing towards the militiaman lying on a stretcher.
The doctor leans over the inert body. He lifts the eyelids, runs his stethoscope over his hairy chest.
‘There’s nothing more we can do,’ he says in an almost inaudible voice.
‘What did you say?’ the bearded man mutters, raising his index finger.
‘He’s … untreatable.’
The militiaman flies into a rage, gesticulating and swearing at the doctor, the hospital and all of Hippocrates’s disciples. Losing patience, he draws his gun and points it at the doctor’s temple. His protruding eyes are bloodshot.
‘You have fifteen minutes to save him. Or else …’
I whisper into Mom’s ear:
‘Or else what?’
‘Be quiet, you idiot,’ she whispers, pinching me.
The doctor knows that he cannot save the dead man. But he wants to save his own neck. He bluffs to gain some time, hoping the militiamen will eventually calm down.
‘Follow me!’
The nurses set the corpse on a gurney and follow along behind him. The militiamen clear out of the operating room. Fifteen minutes later, the doctor comes out, conspicuously raising his gloved, bloodstained hands up in the air to show that he has done all that was medically possible.
‘It’s over,’ he murmurs.
The militiamen break down. The bearded man approaches the doctor and embraces him. Leaning his forehead on his shoulder, he blubbers like a child.
Outside, it is raining shells. Ambulance sirens are screeching. Standing up against the wall of the corridor, we hold our breath. Dozens of wounded, limbs twisted, covered with blood, file past us. My mother puts her hand over my youngest brother’s eyes.
‘Don’t look!’ she orders, as if it were a risqué scene on television.
A fetid odour of alcohol, formol and excrement infests the air. The nurses push back the new arrivals – the hospital is full. That is what war is: these wounded who have lost an eye, a leg, an arm, who cry out every time they breathe; these men and women who are transported to the morgue in garbage bags.
‘Can I help you?’
The doctor has stopped and is looking at my mother with inquiring eyes. She relaxes her lips, but no sound comes out of her mouth. Her little one’s case is so derisory compared to all of these horrors.
‘I have a moth in my left ear,’ my brother replies.
The doctor frowns. My mother pinches my brother and stammers:
‘Nothing serious, doctor. We’ll come back another day.’
Refugees
‘Come, come quick. A policeman is trying to evict Abou Georges and his family!’
I push back my chair, leave the dining room and run to find out what is happening. In the basement of the neighbouring apartment building, there is a huge commotion. A police officer is there, in his grey uniform and cap with a silver cedar emblem. Abou Georges is gesticulating, shouting angrily, yelling threats. In a corner, his wife and two children are crying.
‘They’re trying the old ‘Allah Maak’ on me again,’ he says to me, trembling with rage. ‘This time I won’t let them get away with it!’
‘Allah Maak!’
One day, the police showed up at Abou George’s house and said to him: ‘Allah Maak!’: ‘May God be with you.’ Abou Georges did not immediately understand the meaning of these two words. But when the militiamen pressed the barrel of a gun against his temple he understood. His wife and kids packed their bags – two small suitcases in which they arranged the bare essentials. The following day, at dawn, they left their village in the Chouf region on a tractor. Along the exile route there was an endless procession: hundreds of uprooted families in pyjamas or tracksuits; cars crammed full; adolescents carrying old people on their backs or in wheelbarrows … Abou Georges held his head in his hands. To boost his spirits a Red Cross worker assured him that the UN was going to get involved, that all those who had been displaced would return home within a week’s time.
Abou Georges ended up near our house, in the basement of an apartment building, among other refugees. At first, time seemed to pass slowly. He grew impatient, unable to conceive that the UN could be so slow to react. Gradually he came to understand that the return he hoped for was not to take place in the near future. One morning he was informed that the militia had blown up his house: ‘Not a stone was left standing,’ he was told. The shock was so great that he passed out.
Without a word to his family, Abou Georges began to go through the trash. He found chunks of bread that he secretly heated up and gave to his children. ‘I dream that I’ve gone home, that I’m sleeping in my bed, in my house,’ he confided to me one day. ‘But when I wake up, I realize that reality is different: I’m sleeping in a parking lot, among cars. I have been deprived of my house. I have been forcefully exiled in my own country. I have lost everything. Even hope.’ I proposed that he do the gardening at my parents’ house. He accepted without the slightest hesitation.
‘Allah Maak!’ the policeman repeats.
I intervene.
‘On what grounds are you evicting him?’
‘Squatting in parking lots is prohibited.’
He hands me the order from the Court of Beirut. I quickly read over it. I linger over the last lines: ‘We order the eviction of Mr Abou Georges and his family.’
‘Read, read the first line,’ yells Abou Georges.
‘Bismmel chaab al loubnani’: ‘In the name of the Lebanese people.’
The gardener forces out a laugh.
‘Ha! “In the name of the Lebanese people.” If that is the will of the Lebanese people, to turn its refugees out into the streets, well shame on the Lebanese people.’
‘Calm down, Abou Georges. Show them your refugee card.’
He disappears for a minute, then comes back triumphantly brandishing a laminated card that he hands to the police officer.
‘I am an official refugee. Look, it’s written here, in black and white.’
The policeman hardly glances at it, shrugs his shoulders.
‘These cards are no longer valid. They expired …’
Abou Georges is crestfallen. He throws himself in my arms and sobs. His hair smells like damp earth.
‘I’m sick of this,’ he stammers. ‘I’m going to leave this crappy country …’
‘Where will you go?’
‘To Sweden. I hear that they treat political refugees well there.’
‘But you can’t request political asylum. You aren’t being persecuted.’
Abou Georges shakes his head:
‘We’ve been persecuted for fifteen years.’
Car Bombs
‘Happy Mother’s Day, Mom!’
In Lebanon, Mother’s Day falls on the first day of spring. This is not a coincidence. I place a kiss on my mother’s forehead.
‘You are my sunshine,’ she says, squeezing my hands.
She takes the bouquet of roses that I hand her and walks towards the dining room. Sitting in the corner of the
living room, I observe her. I know her every move by heart. My mother … I am always afraid of losing her, of no longer being able to see her eyes. During the war, I was constantly watching her, protecting her, not only out of love and devotion, but also because my own equilibrium depended on hers. One May morning – how could I forget? – my mother left the house to do some shopping at a supermarket that was three hundred yards from our house. I had my nose in my books; I replied to her farewell with a nod of my head.
A half-an-hour later, an extremely violent explosion shook the entire city. The windows of our house shattered. I threw myself flat on the ground, my hands clasped behind my neck.
‘What was that?’ my father asked, getting back up.
We looked at him, dazed, unsure where the explosion had originated. Taking his courage in both hands, my youngest brother went to find out what had happened. He returned shortly after and told us, his voice tight with emotion:
‘A car bomb … Apparently it exploded near the supermarket.’
‘Mom!’ Without thinking, I rushed out of the house. In the distance wreaths of smoke swirled in the sky. I raced the three hundred yards to the location of the explosion. ‘God, let her have changed her mind at the last minute … Let her not have been hurt … Let her still be alive …’ Out of breath, completely distraught, I arrived in front of the supermarket. The sight before my eyes petrified me: a thick, black cloud of smoke had swooped down on the area; here and there, there were charred, overturned vehicles; everywhere traces of blood, scraps of flesh, fragments of glass, rubble … Ambulance drivers and firemen scattered in every direction. Cries, groans mingled with screeching sirens. I approached a rescue worker:
The School of War Page 5