The Only Café

by Linden MacIntyre

  His mother was in the kitchen with a glass of wine. There was an open bottle on the counter. “Help yourself,” she said. “How was your day?”

  He shrugged. “What are we having?”

  “I’m doing a roast,” she said. “I hope you’re hungry.” He hated it here. Everything from the vinyl-covered padded toilet seats to the fake art deco furniture in the living room, the gloomy drapery, the landscapes on the walls, mass-produced but in elaborate gilt frames; the fussy souvenirs, a soapstone puffin, green-tartan coasters, expressions of nostalgia for where she came from—a place as foreign and mysterious to him as Lebanon. Photos of herself, Cyril as an infant, as a schoolboy, an awkward adolescent; the glaring absence of his father.

  He hated the manipulative formality of dinnertime. Even the knives and forks: too heavy on the handle end, always falling off the plates when he cleared the table. Tacky Laura Ashley placemats. He couldn’t imagine her going to such pains to create an atmosphere of cheap elegance if she were eating alone, which she’d been doing mostly since he’d moved out. And he really hated the gusts of self-reproach he felt when he’d allow himself to recognize that this was her way of showing feelings that she would have considered to be love.

  “Somebody at work today made a strange comment about my name,” he said.

  “What?”

  “That he couldn’t understand why anyone would name a kid ‘Bashir.’ ”

  “I never cared for it,” she said. “It sounds so…violent. The bash in it.” She sipped her wine. “But your father was determined. It seems you’re named after someone back in the old country. I gather there was a Bashir big shot, but it might not have been him your name came from. I wanted to name you after my father. But your father could be very persuasive.”

  “Pius?” He chuckled. “Cyril Pius Cormier. Or Pius Cyril.”

  She laughed with him, but then became serious. “Don’t make fun. Your granddad is a marvellous man.”

  “Don’t you think it’s strange that Dad never talked about his family, back in Lebanon?”

  “He did, a little, when we were planning to get married. The basics, as he put it. But he was determined that his family here would be his only family. I suppose it was to reassure me, in a way. He said once he admired your granddad because Pius is strong and he’s honest. A rare combination in Pierre’s experience. Strong meant corrupt where he was from.”

  “So there was nobody he would talk about.”

  “Just Miriam. His older sister. What happened to her bothered him. A lot.”

  “And did he say what happened?”

  “Just that she was murdered.”

  He emptied the wine bottle into his glass. “Do you mind if I open another?”

  He dreamed that night that he was in a large, unfamiliar city, walking along a silent street that was full of rubble. He was with two men. The younger of his two companions said, “Look, we can take a shortcut through here.” Cyril was transfixed by the voice, the face so like his own. “No, wait,” said the older man. But the strange young man who was so familiar was already heading into what might have been a construction site, or perhaps a demolition project—mounds of earth piled high with massive slabs of broken concrete and shafts of rusted reinforcing rods protruding. He quickly disappeared.

  The older man grabbed Cyril’s arm. “Come, carefully,” he said. Then there was a shout from somewhere beyond the rubble. He couldn’t speak or move, only stare at the man beside him. Then Cyril broke free and started running. The screaming was from a deep hole. He stopped, then crawled toward the hole on hands and knees, looked down. It seemed bottomless. He heard a whimper from somewhere beneath him.

  He stood, ran back toward the street but the older man had vanished and he saw for the first time that he was surrounded by sheared-off buildings with dangling balconies, uprooted trees, weeds and dusty bushes growing out of craters in the pavement; windowless walls, smoke-stained from fires that had raged inside, punctured as if by giant fists; heaps of trash; rags with blackened arms and legs and faces without eyes; swarms of flies, all green and black. And now there were more strange men there, long lines of silent, hostile, whiskered strangers with guns and belts of bullets strapped across their chests, heavy weapons on their shoulders, ignoring him as he screamed silently for help.

  Help me. Help.

  He woke drenched. Consciousness returned slowly. He was in his mother’s house, the bedroom that had been his since infancy. Suffocating safety. He switched on a bedside lamp, flopped back on the pillow.

  Then he remembered, or imagined he remembered, sitting in a living room beside his father on a sofa, watching television. Identical images of destruction. Cars abandoned on a highway; throngs of people with babies on their backs, belongings on their heads; roaring clanking lumbering tanks and trucks with grim soldiers glaring. His father pointing the remote, the images and sounds vanishing. For some reason he remembers he was twelve. Yes. Of course. It was just before his father left from their home, never to return.

  He stood in the doorway to Hughes’s office, one of four along the far side of the newsroom. Hughes was the foreign editor. Cyril occupied one of a cluster of workstations along the opposite wall.

  “When did the civil war in Lebanon end?”

  Hughes looked up from his computer screen, rolled his chair backward, stared straight ahead for a moment. “Which one?”

  Cyril shrugged. “Whatever was going on in 2000.”

  “Ah,” he said. “Spring 2000. As good a date as any. The Israeli pullout. I suppose you could call that a kind of end point. Why do you ask?”

  “No reason. Just trying to get my head around it. In case I need to know. What were the Israelis doing there?”

  “Someday we should have a beer,” said Hughes.

  The handsome young man speaking in the documentary had also been memorable for his flawless English, the slightest trace of a British accent. The pleasant unlined face, the reasonable, affable willingness to chat with a reporter who was also speaking English for a change. He could easily have been a regular at poker night. He had thick brown hair, an untroubled expression and was standing in a space that seemed to have been recently bulldozed.

  He was unarmed, wearing an olive-green pullover that moulded to his athletic upper body. He described the action of the preceding days as a precise operation in spite of the resistance, and said that special care had been taken to avoid unnecessary harm to the innocent. Transportation had been provided to remove the civilians to safer places. The refugee camp had been on private property, its unfortunate inhabitants living in squalor, poverty, disease. The armed response from terrorists inside the camp had been quite unexpected and there had been casualties on both sides. Injury and loss of life, unavoidable and always tragic. Yes.

  The scenes before and after this flattened moment of lucidity in the documentary were jarring. The smashed remains of buildings; smouldering heaps of refuse; and in every shot, it seemed, a human form, sprawled and still, invariably blackened; a bulky woman in a black robe and white flowing head scarf, pleading tearfully. The terrible sound of her querulous appeal to the stolid fighter brandishing the automatic rifle in her face. The boom and crackle of the guns; the rushing vehicles; men in awkward poses shooting wildly at the unseen enemy. All at odds with the smooth familiarity of the young man whose name Cyril had failed to catch because the narration was in Norwegian.

  But now the English transcript told him the suave young man was named Dany Chamoun, the commander in an operation that had killed more than a thousand inhabitants of a pathetic shantytown within Beirut, a place called Karantina, named for its earlier purpose, as a place of quarantine for new arrivals in the once-thriving city.

  The information in the transcript was appalling. A thousand people exterminated. Maybe fifteen hundred Palestinian refugees. Women, children and, yes, fighters who were attempting to defend this miserable concentration camp, a slum surrounded by people who despised them, a place they never ch
ose but where they ended up. That was the gist of the documentary, and how grievance leads to retribution and further grievance, each growing in magnitude, but never outgrowing the simple, venal banality of its origins in the darkest regions of human nature. Greed. Fear. Hate.

  The heavy-handed moral tone was profoundly disturbing to Cyril. He’d screened half a dozen of these documentaries, in French, Italian, Norwegian, English. But he realized that his response to this one had been distorted by a personal identification with that pleasantly articulate commander. How blithely the commander, Dany Chamoun, heir to the prestige of a noble family in Lebanon, had managed to transcend the reality around him, the human consequences; and how easily Cyril had believed him, had accepted him as a reassuring cultured presence in the midst of savagery. Such a contrast in civility to the unstable victims who all looked and sounded alien, hysterical and dangerous.

  Cyril set the transcript down, stared at the now-blank monitor for what felt like hours. When, finally, he stood he realized that he’d just experienced a moment in his father’s secret life. He felt slightly ill.

  9.

  He was standing in the newsroom with his backpack. He couldn’t bear the thought of going home. He desperately wanted to call Gloria but knew there would be no relief there either.

  He heard a door close—Hughes had his coat on, briefcase in hand. He stopped and studied Cyril for a moment.

  “You okay?”

  “Yes. Sure. You’re off?”

  “Yes. Good night.” Hughes stepped away, then paused, turned to him. “Maybe I have time for a quick pint. You?”

  The pubs closest to the office were crowded and noisy. It was a baseball night. So they went to a hotel bar where it was dark and quiet. A waitress brought them a wine list. Hughes frowned at the prices. “This’ll be my treat,” he said. “A belated welcome.” Cyril protested just enough to be polite.

  “You don’t seem to know much about your dad,” Hughes said, after they’d ordered.

  “My parents split up when I was twelve,” Cyril said. “Even when he was around he wasn’t very communicative. I assumed that he and Mom were from the same place, on the East Coast. But then he told me once that he was a refugee. I suppose I thought that was kind of cool. But he wouldn’t talk about it so I eventually lost interest.”

  “You mentioned that he died.”

  “He went missing about five years ago. He was on his boat and the boat exploded. Afterwards there was no sign of him or any hint about what might have happened to him. Apart from the obvious. But that wasn’t good enough for the lawyers and the insurance companies. Things were up in the air until recently. We got confirmation a few months ago.”

  “Any idea what caused it?” Hughes asked.

  “Speculation that it was the propane tank and that the explosion blew him off the boat—the tide carried him away I guess. I gather the place is pretty remote.”

  “He was there alone?”

  “Yes. Taking a bit of a break from a rough patch of work. He was a senior lawyer with a big mining company.”

  “He did well for himself.”

  “Yes, he did. He was a VP. Draycor PLC. You’ve heard of it?”

  “Of course. This remote place? You’ve never gone there?”

  “No.”

  “I can understand that,” Hughes said. “He would have been how old when he left the old country?”

  “Early twenties. I think twenty-two.”

  “A refugee.”

  “Yes.”

  The wine arrived in a carafe. The elegantly pretty server poured carefully, smiled at Hughes, and left.

  Hughes raised his glass toward Cyril, nodded. “Well, here’s to dads. In the end they’re always mysterious. Probably because we can never know as much as we want to know about them. So you’re unique only in the extent of what you don’t know. Which might be a blessing. So anyway.” He sipped.

  “But you seem to know pretty well everything about your father.”

  Hughes laughed. “I know the obituary details. Born in North Belfast. Married. Went to Cambridge. Recruited to the foreign service. Postings here and there. Eventually Beirut, where I came along. I remember a man in a necktie. Even when we’d go for strolls on the Corniche or on excursions into the mountains, he’d wear a tie. Which is probably why I’ve always found work where you didn’t have to wear one.”

  “He was a diplomat?”

  “For a while. My mother told me before she passed on that he couldn’t really deal with all the cloak-and-dagger stuff that went on there during the fifties and sixties. The Cold War stuff. So he switched careers. Taught at the American University of Beirut. I take it you don’t know much about Lebanon.”

  Cyril shrugged. “I’ve been learning.”

  “It’s pretty simple,” he said. “Lebanese corruption. Tribal wars. Exploited by the neighbours, Syria and Israel. It’s all you really need to know.” He signalled to the server, muttering, “This wine isn’t doing a thing for me.” He grabbed a fistful of nuts from a bowl, shoved them in his mouth, and chewed rapidly as he studied Cyril’s face with unfamiliar intensity.

  “Take that young guy in the doc you were watching, the guy talking English. His name was Dany Chamoun and he was head of an outfit called the National Liberal Party Tigers. Ruthless but not necessarily the worst of the lot…pretty typical. Murdered in 1990 along with his wife and their two kids, one seven and one five.”

  “Jesus.”

  “The most revealing part of what happened to him was that he was killed by fellow Christians, Phalangists acting on behalf of Syrians. Or Israelis. It doesn’t really matter which. One of many power struggles. That’s the way it works. I wouldn’t be surprised if he and your dad knew each other.”

  “But how?”

  Hughes shrugged. “So I’m gonna go out on a limb here, Cyril.” He swallowed and took another sip of his wine. “A whole lot of what you and I don’t know about our dads is because, one way or another, they got mixed up in all that shit. And I’m gonna go another few inches out on that limb and suggest that maybe it’s just as well they left us in the dark. We’re a whole lot better off than they were.” He sat back.

  Cyril took a deep breath. “So how did your dad die?”

  Hughes laughed. “You won’t believe this. We were on a holiday in Belfast. It was 1978. A bad year in Beirut. Turns out it wasn’t such a great year in Belfast either. Anyway, he was standing at the bar at our hotel, having a nightcap, minding his own business. Couple of guys walk in and shoot up the bar. End of story.”

  “Who…?”

  “Who knows? What difference would it make, knowing?”

  The waitress arrived at the table but Hughes had changed his mind about another drink. “Just the cheque, please,” he said.

  Cyril watched him walk away in the direction of the subway station. He might have headed in the same direction, but he didn’t feel like going home. He watched Hughes disappear around a corner. He wasn’t a big man. He walked with short, quick steps, head tilted slightly forward. He was wearing a tweed jacket and cotton slacks and carrying a briefcase. From behind you could easily have assumed that he also wore a tie. He thought of calling Gloria again. He called his mother instead.

  “I’m working late,” he said. “Don’t wait to have dinner.”

  “It sounds like you’re on the street,” she said.

  “I just stepped out to grab a bite. Everything okay there?”

  “Sure,” she said, sounding dubious.

  The wine had left a dry feeling in his mouth and his mind was humming with images from the Norwegian documentary. His mother’s disapproval completed his determination to have another drink. And suddenly he knew where he would go to get it.

  It was like a summer evening on the Danforth. Wandering throngs on the sidewalks and flickering candles on crowded patios—he imagined a European capital. Street signs in Greek. Wine bottles, beer steins, fragments of conversations in foreign languages. He stared briefly at burly me
n in light leather jackets who stared back silently as he walked by one patio. Short hair, swarthy, calm, appraising faces. They had tiny espresso cups and glasses of water and nervously tapped cigarettes on ashtrays. So unlike his own neighbourhood west of the Don, just beyond the university, where the ethnicities were mostly white and deeply rooted.

  And then he seemed to cross another line of demarcation. No patios here but bins of produce on the sidewalks, many shops advertising goods in scrawls that he would later recognize as Urdu. Men of all ages, most of them bearded, hurried eastward. In the distance he could see a minaret. There was a family walking ahead of him, mother swaddled head to toe, dad in a skullcap, knee-length jacket, baggy cotton pants and sandals, tall and quiet and aloof. Little girls, miniatures of Mom. And a little boy chattering and dribbling a basketball.

  The Only Café was relatively quiet. There were just two men on the small fenced-in patio. One had a glass half-full of beer. The other man was large, elbows on the table, studying something he was twisting in his fingers. A small book of matches. There was a coffee mug beside his elbow and a cigarette smouldering between his fingers. Neither man paid attention to Cyril as he walked into the bar.

  There was muted music. The Band. Virgil Caine is the name and I served on the Danville train…Cyril stood at the bar for a full minute before anybody noticed. The young man he had spoken to a week earlier was at the far end talking to a woman who was leaning close and smiling. Eventually she nodded in Cyril’s direction and the bartender turned, smiled apologetically and approached him.