Oliver of the Levant

by Debra Jopson

  That afternoon, Dad asked me into his den for a Talk. Uh oh. Black bags, red stubble, hangover, bad mood. A line from his letter to Babette in Bondi leaped back at me: ‘I plan to straighten Oliver out when he arrives.’

  He straddled an armchair, his silver-buckled, black snakeskin belt curled beside him, ready for a whipping. I hadn’t told him about the boys with the air gun, and now I definitely wouldn’t. He usually blamed me for trouble, even when it wasn’t my fault.

  ‘I know you already know everything, but if you don’t listen you’re very likely to come a cropper, because your risk equation’s higher in Beirut than Bondi.’

  ‘Huh? Talk English please. I don’t-a-speak-a maths.’ That was one of Mum’s sayings.

  ‘You’re a child who thinks he’s an adult.’ I resisted the temptation to say that he was an adult who thought he was a child. And that he was a bully.

  When I was thirteen, he tried to boss me into going to school. ‘Don’t have to if it’s boring.’ That’s when I learned the brutality of the belt buckle, flicked at me like a claw. But he didn’t have to watch Mum’s breath, as I did, after she came to love passing out, needling hot liquid into her arm with a tourniquet between her teeth.

  Once, when I was twelve, I’d heard a doctor say after he’d injected her back to life, ‘If you’re not careful, if you overdose, your lungs will simply stop.’ So, whenever the milk haze came into her eyes, I had to watch the rhythm of her breath to make sure it returned. I’d twist the hair on my arms to stop my own hurting. Sometimes, when she’d woken with heavy lids and was safe, I’d storm out. Kick a few garbage bins. Run sticks along corrugated iron fences at midnight, driving mutts barking mad.

  Dad jogged the cracked crystal rocks in his hair-of-the-dog Jack Daniel’s as he dealt with the delinquent he had brought to the most beautiful country in the world. I vowed to suffer through his speech. It was part of the great ocean of life, letting adults’ words wash over you. But a few of his words came at me like a clean-up set in the surf. ‘Especially foolhardy to make eyes at someone’s girlfriend. And not just anyone’s girlfriend – a Phalangist commander’s fiancée.’

  This was veering alarmingly towards a talk about sex. Phalangist. Fiancée. I tried to follow this foreign thread. He held up a Yankee twenty-buck note. ‘Joseph tells me that you bribed Sabine’s brother to find out her name. I can understand you taking a fancy to her – she’s a pretty lass. And you’ve got certain … chemicals … running around your system that make the female of the species appear so much more attractive than when you were … younger.’

  He looked out the window with moony eyes. ‘I remember it. I remember just how damn horny … and, please,’ he clapped his hands together, ‘if you do manage to attract someone other than your own palm, use a condom, for Chrissake. I’m sure your mother told you all about this, anyway. Or school.’ He didn’t look at me to see whether I nodded yes or no.

  Mum hadn’t. And school? Just enough to make me realise how much I didn’t know. I blushed at what he said about my hand.

  How had I slipped up? How does he know what I do in the shower, in bed …

  He twisted the red hairs of one sideburn between his thumb and two fingers. ‘However. My advice … Start with an approachable girl. Someone of your own ilk. Not Sabine.’

  His gaze stopped wandering and he leaned forward, holding my eyes with his. ‘The boyfriend’s a hooligan. He’s got his own army. He trains militiamen.’

  The man from the mosque began his afternoon prayer, his voice soaring. The songs seeped into my life five times a day now, reminding me we’d flown into a beautiful strangeness. But one, I now realised, full of dirty dobbers.

  ‘Listen. My voice is more important than the muezzin’s.’ Dad pretended to cuff me, but it was only his soft palm. ‘I was saying the Christian Phalangists believe they’re the true, pure Lebanese. They want the Palestinians out. Their methods of persuasion are growing more violent, and some are getting carried away with their own power. So leering at one of their girlfriends is … stupid, stoo-pid.’

  I did not leer. Ugh. That’s what old men did. I’d caught Sabine staring and I’d gazed back with my buttony eyes, wishing she could see another me, the one Babette said I would become when I grew into my long arms and legs. I wanted to hear more about Sabine, but Dad was on to another rave.

  He gulped some whiskey down and waved one hand around. ‘It’s a circular situation. The Palestinian kids are easy to fire up to fight because they’re poor and can’t get citizenship anywhere. Most weren’t born in Palestine, but they grow to believe that if they get the homeland back the good life will come with it.’

  He ran his hands over his uncombed hair, trying to flatten the stray strands. ‘The Lebanese Army is trying to hold the Palestinians at bay. The army’s riddled with Phalangist sympathisers. But separately, there are Phalangist militias who attract their share of fanatics – our friend Abdo, engaged to the young lady you admire, being one.’ He described the curves of a female body in the air with his hands.

  So what? I’m not a Palestinian.

  He breathed out loudly and stroked the bags under his eyes. ‘I can see you don’t get what I’m saying, so I’ll explain.’ I rolled my eyes to let him know that he was boring. But then he wasn’t. He reckoned he’d once seen a guy in an Egyptian street, crying and dangling a woman’s body-less head by the hair. Turns out, the man had cut off his daughter’s head after he’d discovered she’d had sex with her boyfriend. ‘He believed that she’d brought shame on the family. That’s what’s called honour killing. Doesn’t happen often in Lebanon, but it could. And the man who dishonours the woman is punished, too – if not murdered then given a good thrashing.’

  The lunatic delusions of fathers.

  ‘If people go mad, it’s got nothing to do with me.’

  He shook his head. ‘Shame’s a powerful emotion. In this part of the world, it can lead to murder.’

  Murder? Of Sabine? Me beaten up? All Dad knows is that I looked at her. Found out her name. Not that I gave her flowers and drowned in her eyes.

  For a moment I imagined myself out of there, saving Sabine from that murderous dobber Joseph, whisking her away in the maroon Caddie. She was wearing Babette’s red dress. Next, we were in a hideaway. She’d dropped the dress from her shoulders, and I didn’t dare lift my eyes from where it puddled around her black high heels. A feverish blush surged into my forehead. But Dad didn’t notice. As he lifted his glass again I could almost see in his crumpled neck the old man he would become. Marrying Babette was his last go at staying young.

  He’s using the warmth of whiskey to push away the chill of his own death, because he’s old now. Thirty-eight.

  I pitied him, for grabbing at Babette to stop him shrivelling up and for trying to force her to be our new mother. He believed Jess and I would go bad, like Mum – shoot up smack, nod off with a stupid grin – because it was in the blood.

  While he began his next rant, about drugs, I watched the pigeons circling in a cluster outside. I mused how old people like Dad wanted my generation to conform as those birds did, wing to wing, following some command. I willed one to break free.

  ‘Oliver.’ I snapped my eyes back to him, making them as defiant as I could. He gurgled, as if he wanted to cry. ‘I only want you to turn out right.’ He nearly got me then, because Mum hadn’t turned out right for me or for him, but I wasn’t going to give in. He just wanted me to bow to his rules so he could fly the world, gargling booze and knocking off air hosties, free of his child-pests. Jess was all skite back home about having a pilot for a father, but that’s because Jess had me. Dad left me to be the fulcrum. Alone.

  My face screwed itself up, my plan to be cool blown. ‘I’m not a machine, like one of your Boeings. No buttons. No wing flaps.’ I was shouting. ‘Mum’s not either. That’s why she wiped herself out. Because she couldn’t be your robot.’

  ‘I worked hard on your mother’s behalf. But it wasn’t enough. She ha
d to shove the money into her arms.’

  In the quiet that followed, I could hear the pigeons’ feathers cutting the air.

  Dad’s legs shook as he stood to pour another whiskey. He moved closer to the birds. ‘Flying in formation. Beautiful to watch.’ He pointed a finger towards the roof. ‘Joseph’s up there, calling them in. He’s a pigeon fancier. Races them and likes a good minced pigeon pie, too.’ That made me laugh. I couldn’t help it. Dad relaxed and continued to list rules. ‘Phone if you’re going to be late home, even if it’s from school.’

  ‘School?’ I had imagined a long holiday, with unspecified educational torture way down the track.

  ‘Yes, I’ll be putting you in the hands of the Americans.’

  He’s bringing in a whole nation to straighten me out.

  ‘What about Babette? What’s she going to do here?’

  ‘She looks after us. And we hope that she learns to love us as much as we love her.’

  I gawped at him.

  We want the same thing.

  ‘And that she learns to cook.’ Damn. He’d made me laugh again.

  8

  Mahmoud

  A dog might have led the way to Sabine’s door, but it was an amoeba that helped me meet Mahmoud-also-known-as-Ringo. When amoebic dysentery had me running the four-minute mile to the bathroom, Dad rang the wife of a flying mate.

  ‘Darlene, we’ve had a crash landing at the Paramount. Beirut belly has struck. Babette’s had a meltdown. You got a spare maid we could use?’

  Souhar, a shrimp of a lady – all bone and golden skin and mouth beneath her yellow headscarf – appeared and turned our possessions inside out, filling the apartment with smells of bleach and orange. She boiled rice and fetched charcoal tablets, which she made me swallow. She pressed her confident palm into my forehead. Mum used to do that when I was little. With Souhar, my forehead pressed back, as if it had been waiting.

  ‘Mahmoud like that too.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘My son. Same age as you, but he don’t study. He goes with his uncle down to the border. They shoot into Falesteen. It makes me fright. You see the Israelis, what they did at the airport? They are strong. They will hurt anyone who walk across the path they want to take.’ She gestured, as if she was swatting a fly.

  I hoped to meet Mahmoud. He sounded as if he was a guy who might have enjoyed Lawrence of Arabia as much as me, but who did more than watch a movie, who went out and found some danger. Like me, when I’d built a bomb back in Australia. He might want to hear about that.

  ‘Yes, you come one day to my house. Eat and drink coffee. Speak English with Mahmoud.’ She lived in the camp on the airport road.

  We had Souhar every day, singing flat Arabic notes as she tinkled the chandeliers with a duster, lecturing us about the Palestinians, waving her arms as if she could finger-paint the political situation in the air with silver polish.

  ‘There is blood in the earth of Falesteen. When I eat a lemon from there, I can taste the blood. My heart tears.’ Falesteen was her name for Israel, which on Lebanese maps was called Palestine. A giant, old rusting key on a chain thumped against her bony chest. ‘This will open the door of my home. My family ran away in the year 1948. I was a child then. Maybe the lock in that door has changed and I cannot get in no more. But I belong to that door.’

  As she worked, Babette lay on a fat couch that she called the cheese longue, reading anything she could get at the British Council library: crime, love stories, Shakespeare, science fiction, fashion magazines.

  ‘Souhar’s a stranger. Maybe a trusted stranger, but it’s still best to make sure nothing of value vanishes out the door.’ She sighed. ‘And your father’s such a neatness freak, can’t bear a crinkle in an ironed shirt.’

  It was true. Dad always put his briefcase down parallel to the wall. When he finished a cigarette, he killed the smoulder and bent the butt over double. ‘That’s his spore,’ Babette said. When he wasn’t home, she’d stub out her fags on a dinner plate.

  Babette didn’t have any friends here, and Souhar made her laugh. Rubbing windows on the balcony, Souhar would hurl abuse if a man looked at her sinewy legs or called out ‘habibi’, my love, and she’d tell Babette to do the same.

  ‘But don’t spit, madame. Many have guns.’

  I heard Souhar tell Babette that when she was sixteen she’d wanted to go to university, but her family had made her marry a man who now drank coffee and played tric trac in a café all day.

  ‘Lazybones,’ Babette said. Souhar loved the word. She repeated it over and over.

  Souhar left sesame-seed-coated toffee under my pillow and said it would be good if I could tell her son that it was important to work hard. ‘My own brother takes Mahmoud to the border. My brother thinks first of changing the world, second about his family. He wants Russia, anyone, to help get Palestine back. He becomes like a communist, because Soviet give him guns. The first time he takes Mahmoud, I follow him south, all the way to the border with Falesteen. Cost me too much money. Robber taxi driver.’ She whacked her cleaning cloth. ‘“Where is Mahmoud?” I ask to everybody.’ She wrung the cloth in her hands. ‘I find him. I bring him home, like this.’ She twisted my ear, hard.

  ‘Ow!’

  ‘Yeah, that’s what he said. But I save his life. I tell him, “Don’t go again. You are not fedayeen. You are schoolboy. You will be killed, before you shave beard. Before you kiss a woman.”’ She was breathing hard now. ‘He swears on his life he will not go again. But every night his uncle comes and says, “Mahmoud, come to commando training. Help me gather all the boys. And I see in my son’s eyes that he thinks I am only a woman and he must follow his uncle because fighting is what men do.’

  One day, as I got home from a walk with the black dog along the Corniche, I heard Souhar’s distant mop-thump, then a creak in Dad’s den. A narrow-faced kid was slumped in Dad’s armchair, eyes closed and head thrown back, his hair fanned out like inky spaghetti on the seat back. He woke up and rubbed his patchy black chin stubble, but he didn’t see me through the glass. His dark eyes drank in the room – the amber lamps and the goat-footed carved desk. I watched as his hands caressed Dad’s fat, padded, forbidden chair in the same vacant way Babette stroked her fur coat. When he saw me, his first expression was one I knew from the inside. I’d worn it myself when I’d seen Bondi brats being ‘darling-ed’ and kissed by their red-lipped mothers.

  He wants to be me.

  And I knew it was Mahmoud, because he had Souhar’s hawk-beak nose. He stumbled up as I rushed forward, my hand out for shaking. He was shorter than me, but thicker. He gripped me hard, murmured his name, shy eyes to the floor. I watched in awe, unable to think of anything to say. Then he pushed me aside, called to Souhar in Arabic and left.

  Why would he want to be me?

  I looked around Dad’s den to see what he had seen: the fat floor rug, the crystal decanters and shiny model planes arranged on polished shelves. I’d never thought of us as rich before.

  But Mahmoud’s got something better; an uncle who takes him on adventures.

  Now I was burning to tell him about building that bomb out beyond the far edge of Sydney, where my mother’s father lived.

  Not long before we left for Beirut, I visited Grandad to say goodbye. Jess wouldn’t go. ‘Booor-iiing.’

  ‘We can get mulberry leaves for your silkworms.’

  He slipped his surfboard under his arm. ‘I’m otherwise engaged.’ He knew that he could wheedle Babette into buying him fish and chips.

  I scuffed along the gravel from Wadi Wadi Station to Grandad’s bush block over the mountains, his old bus sitting on perished tyres in a paddock purple with the flowers of Paterson’s curse.

  ‘Thought it was you. The birds went quiet suddenly.’ Grandad’s breath was rancid with last night’s booze, and his clothes smelt of eucalyptus smoke. I had to look up into his jellyfish eyes. He was a giant. He’d been a farmer, like Dad’s father, but he’d lost most of his land afte
r a drought.

  ‘I see that peachy chin-fuzz is going haywire. I suppose you’re growing a bit of bush round your knob, too.’ Grandad had white hair everywhere, jumping out of his big beetroot ears, rushing out of his nose, overflowing along his arms, bursting above his singlet.

  I hope it’s not hereditary.

  Grandad grabbed me with a one-armed gorilla grip. He had a can in the other hand, as always. Beer used to make him sing, but his voice went AWOL when my grandmother Mabel died. He gave up building their new house then. The foundations were somewhere beneath the weeds covering his square block, plonked between sheep paddocks that fell away to the wild bush of the mountains.

  By rigging elaborate extension cords and cutting into wires, he’d ‘borrowed’ electricity from his neighbour’s garage beside a farmhouse that leaned close to his fence. He’d been caught only once. The man yelled at Grandad, who made a big show of removing his earplugs. Grandad rigged up a really noisy generator, and the neighbour’s wife begged him to return to stealing their power.

  ‘There’s nothing like the allure of power,’ Grandad quipped. He gave the lady some wild passionfruit. Reckoned she gave him the eye.

  ‘I’d give you a coldie but I’m short.’ He made me tea in a stained tin mug, with sweet, thickened Carnation milk. ‘Let’s go up the back of the bus. Bring your bag.’

  He kicked away his detritus: ashtrays full of beer-bloated butts, gaping tobacco pouches, knotted fishing lines, a half-squeezed zinc cream tube, an old hood ornament, a car battery.

  He’d found almost-clean sheets and a passably soft blanket to make a bed for me on the long back seat. We sat beside each other in a silent bus going nowhere. His male loneliness filled the cabin. His hands quivered when I unfolded a map of Lebanon.

  I pointed to a black dot. ‘That’s Beirut, the capital. That’s where we’ll be living.’