Yusef brewed some tea and poured a couple of chaser shots of a clear, home-distilled spirit that tasted of pastis, only far stronger, and we sat in the little front parlour, his mum smiling distantly over the cat and never rocking her chair. There was a framed poster of a Renaissance Madonna and Child above her. The whole place smelled strongly of a kind of industrial disinfectant that was commonly used for family hygiene. The towels and underwear drying in the kitchen showed that this was the bathroom too – I knew from conversations with young mothers that there would be a communal loo out at the back, shared between three of four households. These would be kept as well as they could be, but the sheer volume of family waste backed up, which was a recurrent nightmare for women raising children. I made a casual resolution not to have a second cup of tea, worrying needlessly about germs. To the left of the reinforced frosted glass in the back door that led to the latrine would be the bedrooms, perhaps two of them, the boy sharing with his grandmother, would be my guess.
Noticing my assessment of the property, Yusef said, “Money comes in from the West in cycles.”
“Guilt cash,” added his uncle, leaning in over the stable door, rubbing his thumb and fingers together in a pastiche of the Middle Eastern money-grubber.
“It means the camps turn filthy over maybe three, five years and they fear cholera, so then we get some investment for electrics, plumbing, hygiene. It’s not so bad.”
I could tell Yusef was a little shamed and I wanted to tell him that he so didn’t need to be. “The street at the top has been replumbed and wired.” He smiled and looked off into an imaginary distance. “It’ll be good enough for the Lebanese to move in soon.”
Uncle said something in Arabic and Yusef snorted. I cocked a quizzical eyebrow. Yusef waved an explanatory arm. “He said . . . how would you say?”
“There goes the neighbourhood?” I guessed.
“Yes, kinda.”
Uncle just chuckled and drew on his stub-end. If I hadn’t been there, I was sure they’d not have used the Lebanese as the butt of their joke. It would have been Jews. But a Westerner’s presence made them watch their manners and mask their prejudices. So they showed me that they accepted their lot cheerfully, and it was a relaxed banter, only somewhat forced, that marked my visits, which became regular after that first tea and firewater.
I started dropping in on my own when my routes took me through the area, and sometimes when they didn’t. I was driving myself around more now, while Yusef accompanied a new intake of volunteers. I’d bring milk or a small sack of chickpeas as a contribution and sometimes we’d make matsos and hummus to share, whether Yusef was there or not. I barely spoke to the old lady, but squeezed her hand as I left and she’d smile.
One afternoon, I was there with Uncle and the boy was sitting on a chaise reading old American comics he’d found somewhere, when Yusef returned. It felt good. It felt like we were family. I made tea and we sat on an old bench seat from a car in the front compound and watched the water – and much else besides – as it ran down the centre of the alleyway. Uncle went to look for fresh water as the plumbing had gurgled dry, though I suspected he was off to play backgammon with his mates and lose a little money.
We smoked Uncle’s cigarettes in silent communion and I didn’t think about asking before I said, without looking at him, “Yuse, where’s Asi’s mum?”
“She’s dead,” he said, without pause or tone. “She died.”
“I know,” I said. “At least, I assumed, I guessed. But that’s not what I asked is it?”
He turned towards me and his eyes were smiling. “What you mean? Is she in heaven? Yes. Maybe. She’s in a plot we have – we Palestinians – down on the edge of town. At least most of her is.”
He exhaled smoke and stubbed out his cigarette end on the ground between his knees. I said nothing, but waited and looked up at the sky between the drying washing hanging outside the upper windows across the street. There was also washing hanging on a bicycle, I remember.
“She was killed when Amal shelled the camps. She was visiting friends in Sabra and Shatila. She used to help out with social work there. They had made it to a kind of shelter, but it was hit, a direct hit. It was a phosphorous bomb, made to kill, to fry. She hadn’t taken Asi. He was only a baby then, but she did sometimes take him with her in a papoose. That trip, she left him with his grandmother.”
It had been what they called the War of the Camps, when Shi’ite resentment of Palestinian refugees had boiled over. Amal was the Syrian-backed militia, but they had been supported by Maronite Christian Phalangists, meaning Yusef’s wife might well have been killed by Christians.
Yusef had jerked his head back towards his front room in an indicative gesture as he had spoken of May. I looked past the stable door. “That’s your mother-in-law?”
“Yes.”
“I thought she was your mum.”
“She is now.”
“What was your wife’s name?”
“Ella.”
I cupped his shoulder with the palm of my hand and looked away up the rise in the lane, away from the pain, rocking my hand almost imperceptibly back and forth. Yusef broke the silence. “We have a wreath-laying on the anniversary. Some music, some prayers. It’s soon. Will you come?”
“Yes,” I said, taking my hand away. “I’d like that.”
So I went with Yusef that day. It was a strange dislocation of time and place for this Brit girl, because it was not unlike some brass-band commemoration in a northern English town, except for the brilliant white light of the sky. There were PLO uniforms and wreaths and a marble pillar to rest them against, their petals already curling in the heat. Yusef was calm, detached, a light smile fixed on his lips. He didn’t bring Asi, he explained, as it felt too military and he didn’t want him to be “part of the war”. Not yet, he added to himself. But he had to come, he said, to mark the event.
“Our people won’t be forgotten, of course, so long as we have hearts for them to live in. But it’s important that these events aren’t forgotten either. We’re making our history.”
We sat and drank dark, gritty coffee just off the memorial square afterwards. I watched Yusef grimacing into the light as he tugged urgently on his cigarette, much like Sarah used to. His serenity at the memorial had gone. I think I asked him what he was thinking. And now he smiled again and looked distant. “I see strangers in my country,” he said, “selling stolen fruit.”
We walked back up the hill, towards his Palestinian quarter, flags marking its entry point, and it was as if all the laundry hanging from the windows had turned like the flags to green, white and black, each shirt with a red chevron scarf, hanging lazily, defiantly. He was talking, almost idly, about the Great Catastrophe of his grandparents’ generation, how Galilee was cleared – “War of Independence,” he laughed with a snort – and how more of his parents’ generation had poured over the borders in 1967, how his family had left their village hours before the militia arrived to drive them out, leaving everything, even breakfast on the table. He told me how those who stayed were massacred. Israeli families were moved into the homes; they liked the high ceilings and cool rooms of the Arabic houses.
“You’ll go back,” I offered and immediately regretted my Western reassurance. He stopped and looked at me.
“I don’t want to go back. Why should I want to go back there? This is my home now. It’s nasty, but it’s where we belong now.” He started to walk again, back towards his new Eden. “No, I don’t want to go back. But I want them to pay for our land. They should pay.”
When we arrived at the house, the stable door was open and May was on her feet, the first time I’d seen her out of her chair, clutching a blue muslin cloth to her face and rocking on her heels soundlessly, her creased eyes twinkling with tears. Yusef rushed to her and held her shoulders, turning her to face him; there was a rush of colloquial Arabic, but only a few tremulous, broken sentences from the old woman. I stood at the door, watching this tableau like
it was a mummers’ play. Yuse sat her down, firmly but gently, returning her to her place as one might tidy a room.
“What’s up?” I asked from the door.
Yusef’s head stayed down and he spoke past his shoulder. “It’s Asi. Someone’s taken him.”
He came to the door, his hands shoved deep into the back pockets of his combat trousers. He looked like someone whose train has been cancelled and he was wondering what to do next. And his lips drew apart as if he had backache.
Asi had gone down to the scrubland that separated the camp from the Lebanese side of town to play football with his friends. Yusef didn’t like him leaving the camp, but Asi usually took advantage of his absence to find some more space, like a grazing cub, as Yusef put it.
Further details were erratic – May was something of an unreliable second witness. But some kind of flatbed truck had pulled up, carrying young men and bigger boys. Six, maybe more. They had started spoiling the game, then roughing up Asi and his friends, shouting and jeering. Yusef had already told me that Lebanese boys called them Canaanites, but these were the kind of resentful, more dangerous Lebanese bully-boys who called them “little outlaws” and had been going “tick-tick-tick” with their fingers in their ears. A scuffle broke out and Asi and another boy were dragged on to the back of the truck and driven away. We had this from the other friends, who had run straight home. One father had found Uncle, who had gone down to the makeshift pitch.
“Do you want to go too?” I asked as I sat on the car seat next to Yusef, who was thinking hard, rubbing the palms of his hands together. It was strangely cool now that the sun had gone. “I can stay and look after May.”
He shook his head. “There’s nothing to see at the football pitch. They won’t be there.”
I wondered if Asi was dead and then wondered if Yusef was thinking that too. It felt weird, because we were behaving normally, discussing options as if we’d lost a wallet.
Three small girls came and stared at us from across the street, through the gloom. Strange, how children can sense family crisis and want to witness its drama. Behind them, a man painted a blue door with black pitch.
“I could phone the office,” I said. “See if anyone can help.”
Yusef snorted derisively, then worried that he might have seemed rude. “No, really, thanks – there’s nothing anyone can do.”
“They could call the UN – see if there have been any security reports,” I offered.
“No.” I’d clearly pushed the offer too far. “There’s nothing they would know or do. It would only make things worse.”
I just sat then. My silence seemed to affirm the circumstance, the lawlessness, hopelessness, the errant nature of refugee freedom. When it was dark, Yusef said he was going to talk to the other missing boy’s family. “Shall I come with you?” I asked.
“If you like.”
It wasn’t far. Uphill through a maze of alleys, the odd dark dart of a cat or rat in the alleys. They lived on the second floor of a soft concrete block, the steel rebars jutting through where the blocks crumbled. It was like an abandoned civic car park, where chipboard had been used to fill out the wall space. The father, gap-toothed and lanky in a white vest, was holding a small girl who played with his mop of dark hair. Behind him, his wife was putting two more to bed. They ignored me as they talked and I smiled at the woman, who dipped her head in automatic supplication. I guessed it was her eldest boy who was missing.
The other father was throwing his head back in agreement of something and we left, the door shutting sharply behind us against the now cold night air. We headed back by a different route to Yusef’s house.
“Any news?” I asked, almost scampering at Yusef’s heel.
“No. But he says he knows where the truck is from.”
“Where then? Who took him, Yuse?”
He didn’t answer, but there was purpose in his stride.
“Yuse, where did Uncle really go?”
“I don’t know.”
Back at the house, Yusef disappeared into the back and I pointlessly made some tea. May was rocking very slightly in her chair and she took a cup. Yusef emerged and he had changed. He was wearing a dark keffiyeh, secured with a single-cord agal, a bulging leather jerkin, and his calves were tucked into leggings above sturdy ankle boots. He was pulling on fingerless sheepskin gloves.
“Where are you going?” Even I was growing tired of my questions.
“To look for Asi.” He was commendably patient, I’ll give him that. He pulled what looked like a heavy torch out from a kitchen cabinet.
He bent and kissed May’s forehead. There was a sharp rasp, more of a push, on the door and a shout. Yusef called out what I recognised as “OK, coming”. Then he turned to me. “Is it OK for you to wait here with May? We won’t be long. But if you need to go, that’s fine.”
“We?”
Yusef opened the door. There were four men outside. Three were in the background, young, one dressed like Yusef, two others wearing short bishts, the black woollen cloaks. At the door was the other father we’d visited, still in his sandals, dressed as I’d last seen him. One of the young men was shuffling under his bisht as if he had a lining caught and as I peered out into the dark, it fell open. I saw his right arm flanked with the shiny shaft of a semi-automatic weapon. I turned to Yusef, no longer the compliant visitor, the innocent abroad. I was young but I suddenly felt very much like his boss.
“What the bloody hell are you doing?” I said through closed teeth, hoping those outside couldn’t hear, hoping also to keep a separation between Yusef in the light and warmth inside and those in the dark outside. He didn’t say a word, to me or them, but just walked out and down the hill, the three young men following, the other father lingering for a moment. This man smiled briefly in at both of us, nodded and walked slowly back up through the alley towards his home.
I closed the door and looked down at the old lady. She was looking hard at me through rheumy eyes. I went to take her cup, perhaps to fetch more tea, but she held my forearm with a hard little hand and pulled me towards her. She smiled now, in reassurance. She pointed up with her other hand at the rounded, ochre face of the poster Madonna on the wall beside her then, releasing me, clasped her hands together and sat up straight in a childish pastiche of prayer.
I paused, not knowing what to do. But I knelt beside her, on one knee, and put my fingers together, in the pointy spire we’d been shown at school, and started to whisper, just blowing articulated air through my teeth and watching the old woman. I was saying nothing, it was the wordless whispers of the kind that children fake, pretending to tell secrets. But, through my fingers, she looked quiet, and her tears dried.
It was almost dawn when Yusef returned. I think I must have dozed in the leatherette armchair, because May was looking kindly at me, in that motherly way that old women have when they’ve watched someone younger asleep. Yusef walked in alone and went straight through to the back, where I heard the clank of the latrine bucket and running water. He re-emerged without keffiyeh and jerkin.
I said nothing and didn’t get up from the chair. I realised I was cold, distant. I hadn’t planned to be.
“You OK?” asked Yusef. “Did Mother behave?”
I sat up. “Where’s Asi?”
“I don’t know.” He shook his head and I suddenly felt sorry again, not just for him and for Asi, but also guilty that I had been superior, judgemental. “But we’ve done all we can.”
There was a long pause and I looked at May. She was smiling calmly. “Well, let’s keep hoping and praying,” I said and went to heat up some bread.
I don’t know what time it was that Uncle appeared with the boy at the foot of the alley. The sun was high, late morning, I guess. Yusef had slept for a couple of hours and was now moving about the house doing odds and ends, cleaning. His body was looser than it had been before. He murmured that it had been Shia, maybe Druze, bully-boys who had taken Asi, but he was no longer haunted and the atmosphere o
f prepared bereavement had dispersed.
I had drunk too much coffee and felt sick and had gone out front to sit on the car seat and stare back at any children who stared at me. When I spotted them, Uncle was walking in a sweeping slow-step to keep pace with Asi, his arm across his shoulder, the boy walking with a showy limp, clasping his knee with his left palm. I called “Yuse!” just once and stood back from the stable door, allowing the light in from outside and for the boy and his great-uncle to stand in it. May threw her hands up in her chair and ululated a chant, and Yusef strode from the kitchen and knelt to hug his son, who stood spare-limbed and doll-like, as children do who don’t know how to respond to adult emotion.
Uncle stood grinning and lit a cheroot. “Where is Nadim? You looked after him?” Yusef was talking close to Asi’s face.
“Home,” said Asi. “He needs a new football. They took it.”
Yusef stood and patted the boy’s backside sharply to propel him to the kitchen to wash the cuts on his knee and shin. We followed in an act of welcome and I dabbed his leg with wet loo roll. Then we walked outside again and took the proffered cigarettes from Uncle.
But it was Yusef who spoke. “They just drove them around a bit, waved some guns, then threw them off the truck,” he said. “It happens.”
“Are you OK?” I asked.
“Yes. Sure.”
I paused just a beat. “And the boys who took him?”
He looked at the ground for a moment. “They may not be so well.” Now he looked at me properly, as if trying to think of something to say. “Thank you for staying here.”
I slapped his upper arm in a satire of manly acknowledgement and said, “Please be careful, Yuse.”
I hugged Uncle, hugged Asi like he was mine, kissed May and headed down the alley and towards town to find the guarded compound where I had left the 4x4, what felt much longer ago than just the day before.
A Dark Nativity Page 16