Bleaker House

by Nell Stevens

  I spend increasing amounts of time worrying about these things. Then I worry about time—about wasting it worrying about my appearance when what really matters is my work. The answer comes, always the same: just write your goddamn book. I have somehow fallen behind with my words, so that I can no longer use the rising counter at the bottom of my laptop screen as an accurate marker of time passing. I need to catch up.

  Stop looking in the mirror. Stop loitering in the kitchen staring longingly at the potato. Stop applying disturbing amounts of sunblock. Write the book.

  A Thirty-Minute Window

  Beirut is dusty, lovely, and, for me, entirely new. I have completed my first year at university and have come here for a different kind of education. It is summer, dusk, and chokingly hot. I wander along the corniche, through long shadows thrown by palm trees, inhaling the salty breeze off the ocean. A soft, steady hum of conversation and piano music drifts up from restaurants that line the shore.

  I have come to Lebanon with a group of students to teach English in a Palestinian refugee camp for the summer months. We are spending an orientation week together in Beirut before dispersing around the country; I will be going to a camp called Rashidieh, in the south, near the border with Israel, which I have requested specifically because it is the birthplace of Samir el-Youssef. Gaza Blues, el-Youssef’s story collection, written jointly with Israeli writer Etgar Keret, is one of the reasons I wanted to come. In my imagination, the camp, perched on the Mediterranean coast, is both sublime and horrifying: half literary idyll, half violent, impoverished prison.

  My predominant feeling about the experience, however, is not excitement, or fear, or homesickness, but anxiety. And what I am anxious about is not the risk of kidnap, or being caught in crossfire, or being blown up by a terrorist at a checkpoint, which is what the safety briefings before we left tried to focus our attention on. What I am anxious about is standing in front of a class of children at the summer school and having to teach them something. My dreams are a series of classroom-based disaster movies: there are floods, fires, children metamorphosing into various predators. In one, I am trying to teach the students to say “My name is,” but instead they repeat, in unison, the phrase “No man’s land,” over and over.

  I have a suitcase full of colouring books and games and felt-tip pens, a syllabus supplied by the organization that arranged the trip, and a pressing awareness of how ill-equipped I am, at twenty, to teach anyone anything. I wish I could stay in Beirut indefinitely, and that Rashidieh and the summer school could remain forever on the horizon, suspended in the warm air beyond the piano music and the breeze.

  I stray from the corniche. I eat ice cream and honey-drenched confectionery in glassy, marble-floored parlours, and take pictures of buildings scarred by bullets shot in long-ago battles. On our first evening, the group gathers on the roof of the hotel. People smoke self-consciously and strum guitars, also self-consciously. Below us on the street, a parade of young men on motorbikes roars past, waving acid-yellow flags and firing guns at the sky.

  —

  The next day I wake to discover that, as we have been sleeping, a war has broken out. Hezbollah has captured two Israeli soldiers. In retaliation, Israel has begun to shell Beirut. The group of student volunteers gathers around the television in the hotel lobby, taking turns to sit near the small, noisy fan that churns up hot air. All day, no one goes outside. The hotel owner’s daughter brings us bags of pastries, grease soaking through the brown paper. I am worried, sorry and alarmed, but also can’t help thinking that, if this means our trip might be cancelled, I won’t have to teach in the summer school after all. I call my parents from the payphone behind the front desk. When my father suggests that everything will blow over in a day or so, I am both comforted and, shamefully, more anxious again.

  I fall asleep under a sheet that is soaked with sweat. When I wake the next day and look out of the window, the city is still there. Nothing appears to be burning. I am alive. War is over, I think. My father was right.

  When I join the group gathered around the television in the lobby, I learn that, overnight, the Israelis have bombed the airport. Up to this point, the conflict has been alarming but somehow, in spite of the proximity of the falling shells, distant. Suddenly, now, it is real. The airport, where we landed three days ago with our cases full of toys and pens and school supplies, is gone from the earth, and we are stuck. In an instant, the city shrinks to the size of this sweaty room.

  —

  We escape in a yellow van driven by strangers. At first, it proves almost impossible to find anyone willing to risk the trip; the Arabic speakers in our group spend the morning wandering the streets around the hotel, asking after drivers. Eventually, they find three willing, excitable young men, who arrive at the hotel two hours later. In the lobby, they waste no time with introductions, and hurry us outside into their vehicle. Together, we begin our long journey out of the city.

  Inside the van, there are not enough seats, so we are piled in haphazardly, sitting on each other’s laps or on the floor on people’s feet. The neck of somebody’s guitar juts into my back. As we drive, I watch Beirut outside the window: flashes of blue water between buildings, a pile of smouldering rubble, the aftermath of a bomb dropped in the night. The road is so dusty that the driver flicks on the wipers, carving clear arcs through a beige haze. We are speeding, careering around corners and over bumps and divots in the road. When we thud across a pothole, one of the boys in our group grunts his disapproval. At this, the driver turns his eyes from the road—though he does not slow down—peering into the rear-view mirror to look at us and shout, by way of explanation, “Quickly, quickly.”

  Once we reach the outskirts of the city, the roads even out and the van slows down. One of the men pushes a tape into the cassette player. Music begins to crackle through the speakers. I don’t listen closely; I’m still trying to see outside, although by now the windows are heavily smeared with grime.

  “Sing!” one of the men says. He starts to croon along to the tape and clap his hands. When nobody joins him, he says, more forcefully, “Sing now.”

  None of us knows the tune. It is complicated and hard to follow. The noise we produce as a group is more of a drone than a song—there’s one moment, which must be the chorus, that is clearer than the rest, and I sing that more loudly until one of the other girls, an Arabic speaker called Sara, whispers in my ear, “You know what you’re singing, right?”

  “No, what is it?”

  Before Sara answers, I know what she will say. I realize that, although I know no Arabic, the word I’ve been happily singing for the past few minutes is familiar to me. The word is “Hezbollah.”

  “The song is saying,” Sara whispers, “ ‘One Hezbollah for the whole world. One God for the whole world. Hezbollah will rule the whole world. Hezbollah, Hezbollah, Hezbollah…’ ”

  Whenever our volume drops, the men at the front turn and shout, “Sing!” as if our voices are powering the van. Then we start up again, raucously chanting joyful allegiance to a terrorist organization.

  —

  The men drop us in Byblos, a small Christian town by the sea. Our plan is to stay here at a distance from the violence and await rescue. It is a holiday resort, but deserted. We have the stony beach to ourselves. We float and paddle in the shallows, sharing a sense of overwhelming relief, though none of us ever admits to having been scared. Those nights in Beirut and the chaotic journey out of the city offered a glimpse of a new sort of reality—serious, sinister, powerful—that now, in the bright sunlight of the empty town, recedes like the tide.

  We are waiting for instructions. The director of the organization in London is trying to arrange help for us. Until this is finalized, there is nothing to do. At night, down the coast, we can see Beirut. It is a constellation of lights, as peaceful and remote as the stars overhead. From above, we hear the drone of planes on their way to drop bombs.

  At some point, a collective decision is made that t
he formal part of the programme is officially over, which means the organization’s rules banning its volunteers from having alcohol no longer apply. We drink beer on the roof of the hotel and spend our evenings in a vague, mirthful haze.

  The people who eventually come to rescue us work for an organization called International SOS. They are muscular, severe, ex-military men who specialize in evacuating civilians from conflict situations. They have been in Afghanistan and Chechnya, but they seem taken aback by the task of shepherding a group of politically principled but immature students from a deserted seaside resort across the border into Syria.

  The man in charge is called Rob. He has a moustache and never smiles. He likes to bark everything he says, even “Good morning!” and “Has anyone seen my sunglasses!” Shortly after pulling up outside our hotel in Byblos, he tells us to pack our things. We will be leaving in twenty minutes’ time to drive to the Syrian border. We can’t afford to be late. Three-quarters of an hour later, we are all inside the black International SOS van, and Rob is red-faced, sweating, and furious. “I said twenty minutes!” he shouts. “Twenty minutes! I said don’t be late. You were late!”

  We begin to drive, and the group lapses into a sheepish silence. We are heading away from the coast, inland, and as we go on the landscape starts to look bleaker and darker. By the time we reach the border, the atmosphere inside the vehicle has turned tense and moody. Outside, there are large crowds of people milling around a checkpoint, waiting to cross over into Syria. Rob ushers us off the bus. We file down the steps towards a concrete booth, where we present our passports to a man who stamps them without checking them and keeps gazing distractedly up at an indeterminate point in the sky.

  Somebody asks if there’s a toilet nearby, and a few of the girls wander off in search of one. A boy drags his guitar out of the back of the van and starts strumming the chords of “Hey Jude.” Sara and I decide to walk a little way back down the road to try to get a picture of the queue of people waiting to cross.

  We hear Rob before we see him. His barking has turned into screaming: “Get on the bus! Get on the bus! Get on the bus!” We start to run. In response to his shouting and our panic, the crowd of other people waiting to cross starts to run too, and soon we are part of a stampede. Panting, Sara and I reach the group. We are the last two to reassemble. As I scramble up the steps and the door closes behind me, a woman thrusts something into my arms. It’s a baby, squirming and pink-faced, and I howl at the driver to stop, to open the door again, so I can push the infant back out into the crowd, into somebody’s hands.

  We drive through the night, and by the time we reach Damascus it is nearly dawn. There is a sleepy gasp from the group as we near the city, the lights growing wider and brighter as we approach. We arrive at a large government building somewhere, and are given papers confirming our status as diplomatic refugees by a young British woman with a gratingly crisp accent. We sleep beside strangers in rows of folding beds in a large hall that has been repurposed to accommodate us.

  In the morning, Rob wakes us with pastries. He is a changed man, smiling, urging us to eat.

  “Listen, guys,” he says, in his new mellow voice, “I’m sorry I was tough on you back there. But it was a tight situation. We bought a window from the Israelis, and it looked like we might miss it.”

  It takes some pleading to persuade Rob to explain this to us, but eventually he relents. International SOS had negotiated a thirty-minute window with the Israeli military, he says, during which time there would be no shelling of the border. We had been so slow, and so embarrassingly disorganized, playing guitar and taking photographs, that we had almost missed our slot.

  “Why didn’t you tell us?” someone asks.

  “It’s easier to herd stupid people than scared people,” Rob says.

  —

  Two days later I have been repatriated and I am standing in my bedroom in my parents’ house in Oxford. Objects that used to be familiar—trinkets from childhood, books from university—strike me now as foreign and strange. Everything looks incredibly clean. When I open my suitcase, felt-tip pens spill out onto the floor. I unpack untaught lesson plans, uncoloured colouring books, and my copy of Gaza Blues.

  —

  I attend a Stop the War rally in London. I feel a self-righteous investment in being there, in speaking out against a conflict that I sense I had something to do with. I imagine it will be cathartic, to walk through the city and shout about it. I hope it might help to mitigate the guilt I now feel about how unquestioningly I took my place in the International SOS van, leaving behind the hordes of other people massing at the border; how instantly I pushed that baby back out into the throng.

  I surface from the Underground at Embankment, where the protest is already under way. The air is thick with the smells of weed and booze. People are drumming, singing, getting high. I walk along with them for a while: a woman with green hair twirling poi over her head; a family with three young girls whose faces are painted with Palestinian flags; an old man marching grimly with an accordion under his arm. Somewhere behind me, a chant starts up. At first, it is quiet, muffled. Then it is clear: “We are all Hezbollah! We are all Hezbollah!” The crowd picks up the mantra and repeats and repeats it. Beside us, the Thames is silvery and silent. “We are all Hezbollah!” the marchers shout. “We are all Hezbollah!”

  I duck away from the flow of people and stand, instead, by the river.

  Apples

  I am about to think something unthinkable, a chain of ideas that I now realize has been slowly forming for a while—I may not be able to write this book—when the plane arrives.

  I hear it approaching the island and listen for a while before realizing what it is: a distant whirring, growing louder. Then, the aircraft appears in my line of vision, not just passing by but getting closer, larger, descending. It is going to land on Bleaker.

  I am not expecting George and Alison back for another few days, and can think of no other reason why a plane would come to the island. I scramble into coat, hat, gloves and boots and start to run towards the airstrip, tripping in the boggy mud. The plane has landed and is out of sight over the crest of the hill, but I jog in the direction of the little flag marking the terminal hut, flapping in the wind. The cold air turns my throat raw. By the time I arrive at the airstrip, I am gasping. I bend over, hands on knees, and catch my breath.

  The plane is crouching on the airstrip like a giant insect, bright red, alien-looking. For a second I am so staggered by it that I stay bent over, panting and staring. Then a door opens and the pilot steps out and shouts, “Nell?” into the wind.

  “Hi,” I say. “Yes, hi.” The pilot is still staring expectantly, which makes me think that either I haven’t spoken loud enough to be heard over the weather, or haven’t actually spoken at all. “Hi,” I try again, and then, inspired by the sight of the painted sign on the hut, “Welcome!,” I am so anxious not to seem weird, not to appear too much like a person who has had nothing but birds for company for the past few weeks, that I am probably overcompensating.

  The pilot is holding something. I stumble closer: it is a bag of apples.

  “From Alison,” he says, handing them over.

  Though I have by now adjusted to the reduced calories of my island diet, and my days are no longer dominated by hunger pangs, it has nonetheless continued to encroach on my sanity and subconscious. Instant porridge, powdered soups, granola bars; nearly everything I eat comes in a little foil-lined sachet, and my dreams have started to feature a world in which everything—people, conversation—comes in a little foil-lined sachet. Now, confronted with apples, dangling weightily in a translucent plastic bag, rustling in the gale, I am overwhelmed. There is a beat before I take them from the pilot and stutter thanks. Alison’s potato is still sitting untouched in the kitchen in the house, awaiting an emergency, but there are eight apples in the bag, and I have ten days left on Bleaker, and that means I can safely eat them without regret, starting the day after tomorrow.
There’s a note inside the bag: “Thought you might fancy something fresh. See you soon! A x.”

  Inside the plane there are two passengers: a doctor doing her rounds, flying settlement to settlement, and a Danish scientist who is bound for Sea Lion Island. The pilot introduces us and I wave awkwardly through the glass, wondering if I seem as strange to them as they do to me and concluding quickly that I must seem stranger: a solitary, wild-haired woman reduced almost to tears by a bag of fruit.

  The pilot gets back inside the plane, then reappears at once. “Nearly forgot,” he says. “There’s this too.”

  He produces a large, battered white parcel, hands it over, and closes the door. I clutch it and watch as the plane accelerates, takes off and shrinks to the size of an albatross, a dark spot against darker clouds that look saggy now, full of snow.

  The plane is suddenly gone and I am left standing alone at the airstrip, clutching the apples and the parcel as indisputable proof that what has just happened was real, was not a hallucination.

  Every element of the island I encounter in my day-to-day life has become crushingly familiar to me: the view from the sunroom, the clothes I wear, the objects I handle, the different kinds of clouds. It has been a long time since I last saw something new. Just the sight of these unexpected objects is thrilling. The bruised red skins of the apples nestle together in the bag, dusty around the stalks. The parcel, scuffed and crinkled, has American stamps. It has been directed, in black ink, to the hotel in Stanley, but must have arrived after I left, since someone has crossed out the old address and written instead, “Nell Stevens, BLEAKER.” I wonder who did that—Maura, perhaps? On the back is the name and address of my novelist friend in Boston.