Oliver of the Levant

by Debra Jopson

  ‘They speak English,’ Jess whooped, as if we’d found life on an alien planet. The inside of the shop was jammed up with shiny cellophane sheets of dried apricot, strings of figs in circles, cigarettes (smoks), trays of shrivelled chickpeas (chik peace), razor blades and cans marked ‘okra’. On a blue freezer, an unreadable brand name furled in one long tongue-lick of Arabic across a scratched poster that was covered in cartoons of crimson popsicles and rosy pink cones.

  ‘Eureka.’ Jess grinned at the shopkeeper’s potato face frowning at us above a meat-smeared apron. ‘Ice-cream.’

  ‘No ice-cream … You are in Arab country now. Speak Arabic. We say booza.’

  He turned his bald head and called through a beard as thick as a horse’s mane, ‘Yasmin.’

  She came out of the shadows. She was taller than her father and about my age. Her arms and neck were slim sticks in a red skivvy, her nose and chin pointed. She had flecks of dark hair between her eyebrows, like her father.

  ‘Booza?’ I tried my own winning smile.

  Yasmin clicked her tongue. ‘La. Ma fibooza.’

  La. The sound was as round as the photo of Marilyn Monroe I’d hidden in my desk drawer.

  ‘It is winter. Come back in summer. That is ice-cream time. Now is time to stay warm.’ She hugged herself.

  Jess shrugged. ‘Maleish. Who cares? Those shish kebabs smell really gas.’

  The thin bread was warm and soft as skin, the salty juice of the meat seeping through. We wolfed straight in. Yasmin watched my tongue licking the warm fat rivulets sliding down my arm.

  ‘Yasmin. Jasmine? The flower?’ I said, and she smiled.

  Horror crept into her father’s permanently shocked expression. ‘Yallah imshee.’

  We knew it meant ‘go away’ because Babette had told us to remember those words for shouting at beggars. Yasmin began to slip away from me, sliding backward towards the shadows, just as Sabine had done the other day. I slid past the counter to press a bruised buttercup from my pocket into her hand.

  ‘Yallah imshee!’ It became a roar.

  I threw the rest of the buttercups I had gathered at Yasmin, who gave a high laugh of surprise. I skipped out into the empty street, Yasmin’s father still yelling as we leaned into a headwind to make our getaway.

  At the paddock I got all giggly. ‘Jesus, that guy just went ape over nothing.’

  Jess could be the wisest little old man. ‘She liked you. You can understand why he blew his gasket. She runs off and marries you, he loses his free labour.’

  The sun had brightened and it felt special to be here, in Beirut. I picked more buttercups and held a bunch under Jess’s chin; the gold petals’ shifting reflections spotlighted the pale freckles on his throat. ‘You like butter.’ He began a lazy grin, and while he was all soft and vulnerable I twisted the skin of his arm in a Chinese burn.

  ‘Ah, you prick.’ He leapt up. ‘I’m gonna tell Sabine you’re a two-timer who’s in love with Yasmin.’

  ‘She wouldn’t know what you were talking about.’

  ‘Ooh, love. You’ve got a disease.’

  I swiped at him. He dodged away and bolted for home. The tangled branches of woody weeds reached out and tripped me as I lurched after him. I fell face first into the earth, bashing my knee and forehead. By the time I got up, he’d vanished.

  Suddenly, the air was vibrating with a clacking sound, like a loud typewriter. A torrent of high-pitched Arabic washed up from behind. In one glance, I scoped three skinny boys with wavy dark hair, bony noses and brown jumpers, marching behind like a mini army. The tallest had a long-barrelled gun. The clacking was the sound of his shots. I ran. One boy shouted ‘stop’ in English. A whip-crack-sigh burst in my right ear as I caught a flash of metal from behind.

  I stumbled towards the paddock’s edge, blinded, as if adrenalin had surged straight from my heart to my eyes and fogged them over. More clacking. A dark shape streaked ahead. I thought for a moment that my own shadow had got so freaked out it had taken off without me. My legs trembled and I had to force them to pick my feet up. But the shape turned its head and fixed a lively brown eye on me. There was a red slash of wet tongue. A wolf. No, a dog, running as I was running. It bounded ahead of me with its black tail curved between its legs, animal fleeing animal. I hauled in a deep breath. As the gun rang out again – pop pop pop – a mighty force reared up inside and made my feet soar above the treacherous roots.

  The dog led me right to Paramount Apartments. Out of breath, I squatted in the courtyard, leaning against the wall of carved maidens, feeling the dog’s warm friendship as it licked the last sticky remains of kebab juice from my hands. The buttercup stems still in my fist dripped liquid because I’d clenched them so hard. The flower heads nodded with my shaking. There was another pop from far away. I hoped that the boys had decided not to follow me.

  I’d lost my key, somehow, out there. I hated the apartment door’s solid, stubborn wood as I banged on it, marooned outside. ‘Jess, Jess.’ My yells almost turned to sobs as the dog sat politely behind me. Eventually, its own quiet waiting seeped into me. The dog turned its head at the sound of a muffled step on the stairs. Knees shaking, I looked for a corner where I could take cover. When I saw Sabine’s firm, round face, I almost blubbed.

  ‘Why did you cry out?’

  ‘Someone tried to kill me.’

  She gasped. ‘Haram. That is very bad. Who?’

  ‘Have you seen my brother or stepmother?’

  ‘Your mother go out, before five minutes. Brother?’ She shrugged.

  ‘Do you have a key to my apartment?’

  ‘Yes, my father keeps them. Come with me.’

  I followed the thick liquorice line of hair cut into a point across her back; an arrow, directing me to safety down the stairway. Her walk was self-contained, full of the same careful dignity I had admired in Yasmin. I wished I could walk beside her into her home, but she held up her hand. ‘Wait.’ She left the door wide open.

  A moment later, she screamed. I ran in and found her bailed up against a wall, eyeballs stark with terror at the dog sniffing her feet. Dramatic violin music sawed out of a small TV as a mother slapped a young weeping woman on the screen. I threw the dog out, feeling mean because it had helped me out in a bad situation. It obviously didn’t understand English, but I yelled anyway – ‘Go on, get out’ – to impress Sabine. Back inside, the violins stopped but everyone in television-land was screaming because a man was reaching out towards the young woman’s neck.

  Sabine looked up at me through her lashes. They reminded me of the thick fur of a moving caterpillar. The tips were light, as if she’d dipped them in lemon juice. The buttercups in my fist smelled like green apples and fear. I released the petals, wet with my sweat, into her soft, olive hand. My body was vibrating like a near-set jelly.

  ‘Shookran.’ She flung the flowers onto a small table. During a quiet TV moment, where the man had taken the young woman into his arms, a clack clack sounded outside.

  I jumped. ‘They’re back.’

  ‘Tfaddal. Sit here. Don’t worry.’

  ‘What’s tfaddal?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ She shrugged. ‘Welcome, maybe. I don’t speak English good.’

  She glanced at the TV and sighed. Everything had calmed down, outside and in. As she turned a tap beside the squatter toilet in a teeny room next to her tiny kitchen, I saw that she was poor, like people in movies or on the TV news were poor. The room seemed mean; a hallway with a few hard chairs pushed to the edges. A plate of hummus and a rice dish balanced over a small stove above a tiny refrigerator. The toilet ponged.

  ‘You a-feared for no reason. Those boys shoot rats only.’

  I blushed, ashamed. ‘Are you saying I’m a rat?’

  She laughed. ‘They not kill you. You are a stranger. But the gun is small. You will not die from it. It is not for killing people.’

  I was disappointed with her lecture. I wanted her to think I’d survived an enemy attack. She gestu
red with her hand that I was to return to the foyer. I smelled the staleness of her dirt-coloured dress – old soap woven with sweat and perfume. She seemed not to know how beautiful she was, and it made me want to kiss her.

  She gave me my door key and whispered, ‘I will hide the flowers.’

  ‘Put them in a glass on the table.’

  ‘Mama and Baba do not like me to take from a boy. It is forbidden.’ She fluttered the fingers on her right hand near her face, and I saw a ring with glittering points that seemed too old for her finger. Her right hand – I hoped that meant she wasn’t engaged.

  ‘You can’t visit me?’

  Horror rippled across her face. ‘No.’ Then a sort of cunning crept into her eyes and her voice rose, as if she was teasing: ‘But you bring the cigarettes of your mother to me? With gold?’ I knew exactly what she meant. The Dunhills. I nodded furiously. She pointed to the front door peephole. ‘You can walk past with cigarette and I can see you.’ Then she pushed me outside.

  As I shuddered skywards in the lift’s cranky belly, my whole being vibrated with a vision of Sabine’s dark lips curving around the cigarette that I would bring to her.

  Meeska, mooska, mouseketeer.

  Jess was watching The Mickey Mouse Club on TV.

  ‘Why didn’t you open the door?’ I asked.

  ‘Didn’t want another Chinese burn. Where’ve you been?’

  I tried to bury a smirk. ‘Hanging out with Sabine.’ A glow crept over me as his jaw hung open.

  ‘Nyip. Nyip. Nyip.’ The dog had come up the stairs.

  With a sense of goodwill toward all beings, I let the dog in and gave it the smoked salmon slab that Dad had brought from the Arabian Gulf, and I tried to speak its language: ‘Tfaddal. Ahlan wa sahlan.’

  7

  The Straightening Out

  Everything went pretty well with Dad and Babette – for the first two weeks. He was on holidays, so they partied. She’d told me I was a star when she’d discovered her suitcase was in my room, below the Jimi Hendrix poster that I’d folded into my own bag for the trip, passed the iron over and made rise into life on my bedroom wall.

  Babette stroked her suitcase. ‘My life’s in there.’ She sighed. Then she made her life disappear.

  Days of hunting through her room while she was out led me only to her latest diary. It was a shock to find it open on her pink lace pillow.

  Laughter in the belly all day because Lachlan took me into the Beirut mayhem. We sat in sunshine on the Phoenicia Hotel rooftop, snow from the mountains seeming so close I imagined I could almost touch the cedars. He said I looked like a cat, lapping my milky arak. It’s a dangerous drink. We had another. And another, trying to fill in the gaps in our lives. There are so many gaps.

  I love that warm, companionable fog when we drink together. I told him things, without going too far. Not telling him the thing that will make him hate me. That makes me hate myself.

  Lachlan ran his warm fingertips over my thighs, touching my silk …

  Brrr. I hoped they didn’t do it in public. But she didn’t tell her diary, so I had no idea what happened next, and I felt all twisted up in the memory of the silky underthings in her drawer, until another thought dawned.

  Why would she think Dad could hate her? Why did she say she hated herself?

  After our first fortnight in Beirut, when Dad went back to work, I got to know another Babette, one who I suspected he had never seen. She wore sunglasses inside the apartment, as if Beirut was clamouring to get at her. She said the light was like the traffic – annoying. Nothing was private. She complained that neighbours gazing out of an apartment window would catch her eye and smile, whereas back home in Australia, there would have been an embarrassed fluster, a riffle of curtain. She told me one day as she splayed her eyes wide with her fingers in front of a mirror: ‘A body’s useless when it crumples, and this light picks out the wrinkles. I can’t bear to look.’ I couldn’t see them – her skin was tight as cloth stretched over a drum.

  I liked the nick above her lip that she’d got falling off the stage once. She said it was a flaw, but to me it made her more real.

  It wasn’t the real Babette, though, who in the fifth week we were in Beirut received the phone call from London. The operator had a pinched voice, as if her girdle was too tight. ‘Person-to-person for Mrs Lawrence. Is she there?’

  ‘Yes.’ My voice came out in a squeak.

  ‘Hold the line,’ Mrs Pinchgut said, and there were clicks.

  A man’s voice, full of breath, came on: ‘Babs? It’s Phillip, darling. Hope you’re enjoying life with your new hornbag. So glad I procured your number. I need your address, so I can send that photo.’

  My skin flashed cold.

  The Slave.

  I hung up and left the receiver dangling off its hook, then ran downstairs and waggled a pack of swiped Dunhills in front of Sabine’s peephole. If she was there, she let me hang, as I had The Slave.

  I’d loitered dutifully with the contraband in silence, beneath the dull glint of the foyer’s chandelier, for what felt like hours every day. Sabine’s door remained closed, any occupants behind it mute. I didn’t dare ring the bell.

  ‘Play hard to get, Oliver. It’s more attractive.’ Babette gave me a hug and said it was okay to be lovelorn.

  I reddened. ‘Dunno what you’re talking about.’ I wished I could sink through the floor. But later I wondered whether Babette would ever behave like a mother.

  Finally, not long after the phone call from London, I found her suitcase in her room, in a wooden trunk carved with stars and trailing vines, below fur coats with a perfume of mothballs. 1966 was juicy:

  There has been a wanting – a pressing inside ever since I lay on the river beneath those two men. They heaved over me, my body jolting in the tin hull with each stroke of an oar, my hips sliding between their bare feet. Each time they plunged their oars, the rhythm vibrated in my spine, rolling down to its tip. Delicious, fat drops plonked and scattered over my flesh. I closed my eyes and the air went red. I’d seen a black swan on the river, and I imagined I was being held above the water by this beautiful beating of wooden wings.

  One of the men – Simon, Steven? – fell backwards and steadied himself with a wet hand on my chest. I had such a shock of desire that I thought I would fall away through the boat’s bottom.

  So: I am afraid. These types of reveries led to LL. In other words, disaster.

  I puzzled over LL. That awful old bug-eyed slob in the photo? Maybe LL was Dad and not him. But why was this bloke a disaster? If I could find out what the disaster was, I’d know what I was dealing with. Maybe the disaster with LL made her hate herself. Maybe she wished she was somewhere else, but maybe she would find that our little family was a shell she could lie in, lapped all around by warm water.

  And I can lie in it with her.

  I felt, at least, that I’d conquered The Slave. He hadn’t rung again. He was far away and we were four-strong, on the seventh floor, way above trouble. Except that Babette began to say she didn’t know what she was doing in Beirut. She asked why we were in the Middle East – in the middle, halfway between our known world and the one belonging to the Lebanese.

  Elsewhere. Where you always want to be.

  Dad rubbed her nose with his. ‘You’re a little lonely when I’m flying. We’ll get out more, honey. Then you’ll feel at home.’

  One Thursday, when Dad had the first of a few days off, she got out of bed before lunchtime and announced, ‘I’m going to cook.’ Dad looked dubious but phoned to cancel their lunch booking at a restaurant with gypsy violins.

  Babette set her jaw. She pulled a tea towel over her see-through satin top and stood back in her stilettos, slamming an eggslice around spitting oil, charm bracelets tinkling. With a ‘voila!’ she plonked thick rounds of fried eggplant, then a whole sunken-eyed fish, onto each of our plates. When I stuck my fork into the eggplant, an arc of hot olive oil flew into Jess’s eye.

  ‘Oliver, wat
ch what you’re doing,’ Dad sighed, as if he could never expect anything but trouble from me.

  ‘Couldn’t help it.’ The dead white fish eye was hexing me, making me want to heave, but I wasn’t going to spit out my disgusting mouthful, because I didn’t want Dad to get mad at Babette.

  Dad raked his knife back and forth over the glistening scales. The fish should have known that when Dad wanted something you had to give it to him, or else. The scales flew all over the table; Dad muttered beneath his temper. ‘Some people are so clumsy that they’d trip over a pattern in a carpet.’

  Babette sat staring, half into space, half-watching three women on a balcony parallel with our apartment as they turned a tin of coffee beans round and round over a fire. They laughed and waved at her, a fellow being, alone on an island with three males.

  Dad gagged on an iron-grey film of fish flesh. ‘You didn’t scale or gut the fish.’

  Babette looked bewildered, her eyes green cut glass. ‘I didn’t know I had to. I’ve never cooked fish before.’

  Dad pointed at our plates. ‘You don’t have to eat that catastrophe, boys.’

  Jess cupped a hand to his mouth: ‘Warning from the captain. We’re about to ditch. Do not eat the fish. Warning.’

  Babette stood, stiff as an arched cat. I braced for an argument, but it was nothing like with Mum. Not yet.

  ‘Sorry, darling. You have to admit the fish is putrid.’ Dad was laughing, now.

  Babette looked across the breezeway. The women had stopped turning their coffee tin. ‘Oh, marry a maid if you want a drudge.’ She unhooked her handbag from her chair and clicked across the marble, slamming the front door. Dad ran after her.

  They stayed out all afternoon and into the night, coming home around dawn, giggle-whispering as they wobbled to bed. They’d probably been swilling booze in one of the restaurants that hung over the sea on wooden legs, then bar-crawled to an early breakfast at first mosque’s cry. Jess and I had scoffed cans of frankfurts and Morello cherries from the curfew cupboard, which was emptying fast.