by Rawi Hage
The coffee is foaming on the stove, and you have to go, young man.
GEORGE WAS WAITING for me. I walked toward him and handed him fifty liras. Pretend not to know me, I whispered.
Which machine do you want it in?
What do you mean? I asked.
Which machine? He sounded irritated. I will transfer the amount to that machine.
Oh yes. Number three.
I went to number three and there were fifty liras in credit waiting for me on the upper right-hand corner of the screen.
I played for twenty liras and lost. I went back to him and said that I needed the balance back, the thirty that was left.
He gave it to me.
I walked back to my home, thinking that, yes, there had to be a way.
TEN THOUSAND BOMBS had dropped like marbles on the kitchen floor and my mother was still cooking. My father was still buried underground; only Christ had risen from the dead, so they say. I was no longer expecting my father to show up at the door, quietly, calmly walking into the kitchen, sitting at that table, waiting for my mother to serve him salad and thin bread. The dead do not come back.
Ten thousand bombs had made my ears whistle, but I still refused to go down to the shelter.
I have lost too many loved ones, my mother said to me. Come down to the shelter.
I did not go.
TEN THOUSAND CIGARETTES had touched my lips, and a million sips of Turkish coffee had poured down my red throat. I was thinking of Nabila, of poker machines and of Roma. I was thinking of leaving this place. I lit the last candle, drank from the water bucket, opened the fridge, and closed it again. It was empty and melting from the inside. The kitchen was quiet; my mother’s radio was far away, buried down in the shelter, entertaining rats and crowded families. When the bombs fell, the shelter became a house, a candy castle and a camp for children to play in, a shrine, a kitchen and a café, a dark, cozy little place with a stove, foam mattresses, and games. But it was stuffy, and I’d rather die in the open air.
A bomb fell in the next alley. I heard screams; a river of blood must be flowing by now. I waited; the rule was to wait for the second bomb. Bombs landed in twos, like Midwestern American tourists in Paris. The second bomb fell. I walked slowly out of the apartment. I walked down the stairs and through the back alleys, guided by screams and the smell of powder and scattered stones. I found the blood beside a little girl. Tony the gambler was already there, with his car ready to go. He was half-naked and stuttering, M-a-r-y mother of God, Mary m-o-t-h-e-r of God. He kept repeating this with difficulty, breathless and frozen. I carried the little girl. Her wailing mother was hysterical; she followed me to the back seat of the car. I took off my shirt and wrapped it around the girl’s bleeding ribs. Tony flew his car toward the hospital. He honked his siren. The streets were empty; the buildings looked hazy and unfamiliar. The girl’s blood dripped on my finger, down my thighs. I was bathing in blood. Blood is darker than red, smoother than silk; on your hand it is warm like warm water and soap. My shirt was turning a royal purple. I shouted and called the little girl by her name, but my shirt was sucking up her blood; I could have squeezed it and filled the Red Sea and plunged my body in it, claimed it, walked its shore and sat in its sun. My hands were pressing on the little girl’s open wound. She faded away; her pupils rolled over and disappeared into a white, soft, dreamy pillow. Her head was leaning toward her mother’s round breast. Her mother picked up Tony’s mantra and they both repeated, Mary mother of God, Mary mother of God. The little girl was leaving to go to Roma, I thought. She is going to Roma, lucky girl. Tony honked a farewell in a sad rhythm to the empty streets.
THE NEXT MORNING I was meeting George down at the corner by Chahine the butcher’s. There was a line of women waiting for the meat. Inside, goats were hung, stripped of their skin. White and red meat fell from above, pieces were cut, crushed, banged, cut again, ground, put in paper bags, and handed to the women in line, women in black, with melodramatic, oil-painted faces, in churchgoer submissive positions, in Halloween horrors, in cannibal hunger for crucifix flesh, in menstrual cramps of virgin saints, in castrated hermetic positions, on their knees and at the mercy of knives and illiterate butchers. Red-headed flies strolled everywhere, there was animal blood on the floor, butchers’ knives paraded on stained yellow walls. The bombing had stopped, and women had come out from their holes to gather tender meat for their unemployed husbands to sink their nicotine-stained teeth into and seal their inflated bellies.
George was walking down the street toward me. When I spotted him, he waved to me. A man in a green militia suit stopped him. They shook hands; George gave him three kisses on the cheek.
As I waited, I watched the flies resting on the mosaic tiles, feasting on perfect round drops of blood.
Who is that? I asked George.
Khalil. He works with Abou-Nahra.
Maybe it is not a good thing that he sees us together, I said, thinking of the poker machines.
He hardly ever comes to the casino. Not to worry.
Maybe there is a way to get a cut of the money, I said. And it might be simple. I come and pay you the money, and you press the credit in the machine while I am playing. Does the machine keep records . . . I mean, if you have a straight flush, for instance, would it record the winning strike somewhere?
No. I don’t think so, George said.
We have to be sure. I will pass by on Monday. We can try it. While I am playing, inject some credit in there. A small amount, not much, just to try.
Come by in the morning, early . . . usually there is no one there, George said.
And maybe we should stop meeting in the open for now, I said.
I WENT TO THE little girl’s funeral, the little girl who was on her way to Roma. Her mother was wailing. Women with veils over their hair filled the little alley. My mother went to the funeral too. They come to our funerals, we go to theirs, she whispered to me in a moral tone.
The girl’s father flew back from Saudi Arabia, where he worked in the burning fields of sand and oil. He walked to the front, crossing his thick hands, his sunburned face in flames, his dark eyes sobbing, his feet dragging on dust and sand. The small white coffin was carried by the girl’s cousins and neighbours on the long walk to the cemetery; as the sunlight landed on the white wooden box it twinkled, the wood and the metal twinkled, everyone twinkled, even I twinkled. Men in grey suits and black ties moved slowly, past the closed stores, and sagged their heavy heads toward the floor. Tony was behind me, stuttering and telling his tale of driving, death, and hospitals. I was surrounded by familiar faces filled with grief. Behind us, the mother was fainting, hanging on to the women’s arms. She was pulled forward, slapped and sprinkled with rosewater by women who were beating their chests, chanting farewell and wedding songs, wailing, waving white handkerchiefs high in the air toward the Leaning Tower of Pisa.
3
MONDAY MORNING, I WALKED TO GEORGE’S WORK. NO ONE was there but him. I paid; while I played, he injected credit into the poker machine. Success! I collected and left.
I met George that evening, on the stairs of the church.
Let’s wait and see if they notice, I told him. Maybe they have a way of finding out. It is not too big an amount. If they find out, we could pass it off as a mistake.
I gave him half of the money, and we separated.
On my way home, I went by Nabila’s place. There was no light on at her house. The city was dark. No TV was on, no water was cold; ice cream melted in cube-shaped fridges and the old men drank whiskies with no ice. I saw Rana, our neigh-bour, and hardly recognized her at first. She said, Bonsoir, and I replied, Bonsoirayn for you, and where are you going in the dark with a silk shawl on your shoulders?
To the store to buy candles.
With a face like yours, who needs candles? I said.
Rana laughed and told me to go home and to be careful not to trip on the stairs. It is dark, she said.
There is a moon close by, I said.
It is still dark.
We can light a candle, I said.
Where? she asked. Your mother’s place or mine? And she put her hands on her curved hips. Her hair fell onto her shoulders, and her wide black eyes waited for my response.
In Roma, I said.
What?
I did not answer and crossed to the other side of the street.
SAAD, OUR NEIGHBOUR, got a visa to Sweden.
He threw a party the night before his departure. He knocked at our door and invited me to the goodbye celebration.
Stockholm, he said. Yeah, Stockholm, and shook his head.
At seven that night, I showed up at his place, hungry. His mother had prepared a mazah. I broke the bread and dipped my fingers in small, round brown plates. The electricity was still cut off, but there were candles and a lantern lit up. Some flies had travelled over from the butcher store, and they hovered around the lanterns then burned. Saad’s brother Chahker — a pompous idiot, if you ask me — was there. So were his cousin Miriam and his mother and father and a few of his relatives and friends. George was there, too, drinking and smoking quietly.
I looked at George and he smiled at me.
Jokes were made about Sweden and Swedish women, blondes and the cold weather. A man with thick villager’s hands and a rough neck and a mountain accent started to sing. Saad’s family joined in. They sang songs that were foreign to me, villagers’ songs that I had never heard before, hymns of goodbye and return and marriage, warnings not to marry foreign women: Our women are the best in the world, they do not dishonour you, and our land is the greenest. Go make money and come back . . . She will wait for you.
But those who leave never come back, I sang in my heart.
George drank heavily. He laughed and flirted with Saad’s cousin. It made Chahker nervous and jealous. Chahker had asked for the hand of Saad’s cousin, but she had refused. She was young, with red cheeks and long legs. She was caught between her villager’s norms and trying hard to show off her newly acquired urban manners. Saad and his family were refugees from a small town; they had fled when a gang of armed forces attacked and massacred a great number of villagers and farmers.
By late that evening, George was very drunk. I pulled him down to the street and he threw up on the curb.
He reached for his motorbike, but I stopped him, and he swung punches at me. I held his hands, talked to him, trying to calm him down, asking him not to shout. Then I dragged him to his aunt’s place. I left him lying at the bottom of the stairs, ran up and knocked at Nabila’s door. She opened the door, frantic. Who? she said. Is Gargourty okay? Who? Oh, Virgin Mary, help us. Who?
No one, I said. Everyone is alive. George is just drunk and sick.
Where is he?
Downstairs.
Nabila ran down the stairs, her hand barely touching the ramp, half-naked and filled with fear; she caressed George’s cheeks and kissed the tips of his fingers.
Together, we picked him up and carried him upstairs. Nabila cleaned him, took off his shirt, his shoes, and his pants, and gave him her own bed and covered him with an old blanket. Then she sat on the sofa and wept.
I worry about him, you know? When a phone rings late at night I often think that someone is dead. He has a gun. Why does he carry a gun?
It is his work. He needs it, I said.
He should go to school. I will pay for his studies. Let him go back to school.
She offered me coffee, and I accepted. She tiptoed to the kitchen and poured water in a rakwah, grabbed a small spoon, the coffee, the sugar. She boiled the coffee thrice, brought it on a tin tray, and let it rest like a gracious wine before pouring it for me in a small cup.
I drank. Nabila watched.
Is it sweet enough for you? she asked.
Yes.
I read George’s cup the other day. It was dark, so dark. Let me read yours.
I do not believe, I whispered.
She held my cup and looked inside. She saw waves, a distant land, a woman, and three signs.
The usual superstitious beliefs, I said.
No! I see it. Come over here, see? This is the road, this is the sea, and this is the woman. You see?
No, but . . .
She smelled like the night. I slipped my hand onto her knee.
Nabila held my hand, pressed it, and moved it toward my chest. No, Bassam, go home. She kissed my hand as if I were her own child. Take care of George, tell him to go back to school. You should go back to school too. You are a smart kid, you like to read. As a child you recited poems with your uncle.
Goodnight, I said.
You take care of Gargourty, Nabila said, and followed me to the door.
I went home to my bed. When I woke up, Saad had gone to Sweden.
BOMBS FELL, warriors fought, people ate, and the garbage piled up on the corners of our streets. Cats and dogs were feasting and getting fatter. The rich were leaving for France and letting their dogs roam loose on the streets: orphan dogs, expensive dogs, potty-trained dogs, dogs with French names and red bowties, fluffy dogs, well-bred dogs, china dogs, genetically modified dogs, and incestuous dogs that clung to one another in packs, covered the streets in tens, and gathered under the command of a charismatic three-legged mutt. The most expensive pack of wild dogs roamed Beirut and the earth, and howled to the big moon, and ate from mountains of garbage on the corners of our streets.
I walked past hills of garbage. The smell of bones, the sight of all that is rotten and refused, made me rush down, aimless, toward the gas station, where I saw long lines of cars waiting to fill their tanks. I saw Khalil, George’s friend, in a militia jeep with no roof and no windows. He drove straight into a crowded gas station. He stopped his machine, came down, took his rifle, and shot in the air. He shouted, waved his hands, and ordered cars to go back, forward, and to the side. Then he fired more shots. The cars dispersed. Khalil drove his jeep close to the pumping station, filled his gas tank, and drove away.
THAT NIGHT, I WENT up to the roof. There were no bombs exploding like colliding stars. I gazed at the calm, obscure sky that settled above me like a murky swamp, hanging upside down. All seemed about to fall, to spread darkness and drown. On the roof was a large water barrel that I usually hid things under. I pulled out a piece of hose, wrapped it around my waist, and waited for George to show up. The moon was round and hovering above my city. We, the moon and I, watched lit candles flickering quietly in young virgins’ rooms while they were getting dressed for the night, climbing into their single beds, throwing their combed hair on goose-feather pillows stuffed by grandmothers with names like Jamileh and Georgette, veiling their pubic hair in cotton and silk sheets, dreaming of hairless white men in sports cars and provincial suits telling them fairy tales, in a foreign language, in secret, to make their little toes curl under the covers, away from their mothers’ eyes.
My accomplice was the dirty moon. He shone, and I watched.
When George came, we drove to Surssok, an old bourgeois neighbourhood with maids who served rich housewives wearing chic French dresses and possessing walk-in closets filled with leather shoes. They had apartments in Paris, and husbands who imported cigarettes, containers, and car parts, who coughed in Swiss banks at wooden mahogany desks occupied by nephews of chocolate factory owners, grandsons of landlords of African cocoa fields dotted with workers with bruised fingers, who worked under many suns, who worked on Sundays and Fridays. Those husbands ate in velvet restaurants and stayed in expensive hotels with large beds, Portuguese cleaning ladies, and thick towels. They puffed thick Cuban cigars, consulted their round, golden watches, spat filthy words like “shipments” and “invoices” over cognac and elevator music, words that bounced off mirrors and bald bartenders with multilingual prostitutes who drooled long, silver earrings on executive suits while looking bored and bitter.
American cars have no locks on the gas tanks, I said to George. They are the good ones to empty.
We stopped next to a white Buic
k. I pulled the hose from around my waist. I spun it in the air; it whistled. George laughed, and I spun it some more, and it whistled again. I opened the gas tank cover; George laid his motorbike on its side. I drove the hose inside the gas tank; it slipped gently in, like a snake into a ground hole. I lay my lips on its tail, sucked in, inhaled a flow of gas. It rushed toward my teeth. I directed the stream toward our gas tank. We filled the tank, and then we crawled, escaped and evaporated through a night of mist and dew. The smell of gas in my throat made me nauseous. We stopped at a store and got a can of milk. I drank it and vomited bread and poison between two rusty cars.
THURSDAY MORNING, I passed by George’s work again. I handed him some money, installed myself on a stool facing a poker machine, and played. On the screen I saw my credit increasing. There was an old, unshaven man sitting two machines down from me. A cigarette burned on his lip and made his wrinkled eyelid twitch. He was hitting the buttons almost blindly, without looking.
I tried to imitate his speed, his nonchalant attitude, his familiarity with fate and chance, his indifference to loss, his silence, his equanimity. He hung off his stool as if ropes from above held his defeated body, lifted his arms, and dropped them in suicidal freefalls on round plastic buttons.
THAT EVENING, I MET George at his place. He lived alone, down beside the French stairs, in an old stone house with little furniture, a photo of his dead mother under a high ceiling, and emptiness. He never mentioned his father. The word was that his father was a Frenchman who had come to our land, planted a seed in his mother’s young womb, and flown back north like a migrating bird.
I pulled out the money I’d made that morning, counted half and gave it to him.
We sat in George’s living room on an old couch between echoing walls. We whispered conspiracies, exchanged money, drank beer, rolled hash in soft, white paper, and I praised Roma.