Oliver of the Levant

by Debra Jopson

  Grandad stared at the dot on the edge of a paper-blue sea; currawongs called into the evening. ‘Ach, Beirut. I’ve been there.’ No matter how much I pleaded, he wouldn’t say another word. Mum had told me long ago that he would never talk about the war. Most of the time, he wouldn’t talk about Mum, either, his disappointment of a daughter.

  In the morning, we felt thuds through the earth before we’d even counted our night-time mossie bites.

  ‘Creeping Jesus. Thought I was back in Damour. But it’s only the fellas from the waterworks puttin’ in the sewer pipe with a few strategic detonations.’

  ‘Back in what?’

  He went all quiet. ‘Wouldn’t you like to know?’

  ‘I’m gonna find out how they blow stuff up.’

  ‘Well, I know, but I’d never tell the likes of you. It’d be my luck to tell yer mother you’d blown yer head orf.’ He did tell me, though, that the chalky white sticks the men carried as tenderly as they would newly laid eggs were gelignite.

  For three days, I flitted between silver-brown trunks, following the men in orange. They didn’t hear me, in their loud vests. They had turned-down, serious mouths, as if what they were doing wasn’t fun. Adults liked to act as if they are carrying some sad secret, even when they were enjoying themselves. For a long time I’d wanted to know why, but I didn’t want to become one of them. Trouble is, I suspected that once you knew why they were so serious you’d become one of them. There would be no turning back to a place where people wore kind, open faces.

  Their shovels hit ringing rock, which jerked their hands and made them swear. Eventually, at one of their targets, they had holes big enough to shove in the white sticks, which they’d trimmed at the top and wired to a box. KAAAA-BOOOOOM. When they made dirt and rocks fly, the buzz in my ears fizzed down to my heart.

  I waited until the men had gone, and I gathered the tops of the sticks they’d chucked into the bush. I carried them in a bag they’d thrown away and stuffed them into a sandstone cave near Grandad’s block.

  I found Grandad in a jolly mood as he burned sausages over belching smoke. I hoped that he’d tell me what the device was that had blown up the gellie. But he said, ‘Oh now, boy, I know you too well,’ and went to bed straight after sunset. As I read by torchlight he started breathing more heavily, until he yelled into the bus ceiling ‘Oh, Mabel!’ and lay still. I zinged with threads of pleasure like I had a fever – and then was ashamed, my stomach plummeting inside like a lift cut loose from its anchors. Grandad snored. He was on an escalator to paradise.

  On the third day, when spider webs sparkled with raindrops, I discovered two other boys also spying on the men. They saw me and grinned, because the men were firing up for a blast. The bush went quiet, as if it was expecting something to happen. That’s how the bush works. Everything just waits and then something small but sweet happens; a wind comes up and shakes the leaves so the trees make their own rain, or a tiny bird with blue stripes lands on a twig, or a funnel-web spider pokes its head out of a crevice.

  The men had something big planned: rearranging nature. We kids were stuck in that maddening silence, waiting for it, our eyes on one patch of earth. A wire like a snake glistened over the ground. I was trying to spot the explosive device when the ground blew. Spasms shot through my body, from my skull to my soles. The blast made the men’s voices rise, while rock, sand, leaf and lizard jumped and shredded in the light, as if the bush had been caught in a shattering mirror. I felt sorry for the lizards. And sorry for myself when a piece of rock sailed through the air and just missed me. The shark-fin face of one of the boys was wide with screaming.

  I picked up the rock. It was vibrating with my tremors.

  My lucky rock.

  ‘Those friggin’ boys again,’ one of the men yelled. I took off at a clip, behind the other two.

  ‘Well, they’re not hurt, the little shits, if they can run like that,’ another man called out.

  I caught up with the boys at the road. We all bent over, huffing and hurting, then broke out in jelly-wobble laughter.

  ‘I want to blast everything to smithereens like that!’ I waved my arm back towards the blast. The kid with the angular face nodded fast. He was winded, but he wheezed his name out, ‘Sharkie’, and said, ‘They got ya. You’ve got blood on your face.’

  I wiped my mouth and the words raced out. ‘I’ve swiped some of their gellie. I’m looking for a detonator. They use a little black one about this big – fits into a matchbox.’

  Sharkie shook his fist. ‘We’re in! We’re gonna find one.’ His big-eared friend, Claude, twirled around like Lawrence in the desert.

  I felt as mellow as golden syrup.

  Me, always on the outside, in with those cool kids.

  That’s what I wanted to be like, with Mahmoud. He sounded cool.

  ‘When can I visit?’ I asked Souhar.

  ‘Soon, Inshallah.’

  9

  Education

  ‘School!’ Dad dragged away my bedclothes. I didn’t have to wear a uniform, but I still ducked my head walking past Sabine’s peephole, because it’s hard to swagger like a militia leader when your father’s hustling you off to incarceration. If I could have dreamed up some killer trick to give my fellow students google eyes, maybe I would have stopped quaking. But I just knew that when I arrived the other boys would be formed into unbreakable knots. I’d be a stray strand.

  I can’t let my voice run out of control.

  More and more, a word would tumble out an octave higher than the others, like a butterfly in a bunch of moths. I knew what was hijacking my voice. The secret thought made blood rush up my throat. One of my balls had grown into a giant, while the other remained small and obedient. One was purple and brash like a drunk, and the other was a submissive nut which stayed in its mauve shell and behaved.

  Mrs Apfel had called balls ‘gonads’ in the excruciating ‘guidance’ classes in Sydney, and she’d said that as we grew they’d shoot out surges of testosterone that would make our voices drop and our hands keep wandering to our private parts. What was private about them, if she knew what I was doing with them? My testosterone surged in the night, making my voice drop one minute and then rise a whole octave the next. A piano dropped from a cliff. I hated it. I blamed the rogue ball, the big one. It was a swollen sac with a big ego. I’d open my mouth and the rogue ball would carry out its raid, lobbing a squeak into my voice box, making me sound stupid. It was bigger than either of Dad’s two perfect, wrinkled prunes.

  I thought maybe cancer had engorged the rebellious nut. If so, I wanted to pash Sabine at least once before I went. I’d press the key I still hadn’t returned into her hand, then grab a kiss. I’d get Mahmoud to let me ride with him, windswept in the back of a tray-top truck, guns against our shoulders, small boys along the roadside staring in admiration as we whipped past all the way to the Israeli border.

  I was alone in my worries as our car pointed its hood ornament up the mountain, while merchants stretched their morning limbs like creaking old cedars.

  ‘The air’s lovely here,’ Babette said. We’d risen above the Mercedes taxis belching sooty diesel fumes. The relaxed angle of Babette’s head warmed me. This was how we’d keep her from The Slave, who’d managed to get a letter through.

  Babs,

  I understand that you don’t want me to send the photo, even though I had to hang about in the New London Ice Age, freezing my balls off to bag it. But that doesn’t mean you can’t answer the phone. Or ring me. I worry about you in that tiny cauldron of discontent.

  It must wrench your heart to be so far from him.

  Love and misses,

  Phillip

  Her heart wasn’t wrenching now. She watched the weird passing world, as if it had all been created for her amusement, on the car ride up the mountain to my school. She pointed and made strange squeals over a procession of donkeys piled high with tyres and a bunch of men on push-bikes, hauling towers of firewood.

  Wheneve
r grinding traffic held the Caddie still, frowning crowds rushed up to our windows to press packets of food against the glass; peanuts, lollies and sticky cakes. Afterwards, Babette opened her window when I felt carsick. At a roundabout ringed with white stone houses spilling jasmine from balconies, a mass of hands pushed in at Babette, bringing a scent of honey, cinnamon and used banknotes into the Caddie. She arched away and wound the glass shut so fast that one man nearly lost his fingers. Someone whacked the car in anger and Dad gunned it, making the villagers leap back.

  Babette fluttered her hand at her chest to mimic her heart’s beat. The city had become a smudged network of angles below, roofs bristling with leaning television aerials, telegraph wires crisscrossing, church spires thrusting up crosses and mosque towers sprouting crescents.

  Jess broke the crackling air inside the car with a captain’s announcement: ‘We’re cruising at an altitude of 35,000 feet.’

  The school was a grid of square buildings at the top of the mountain in the middle of fields. The smell of pine tree resin filled the darkening sky. The trees made me think of a photo Mum had of Grandad from the Second World War, posing in his uniform in the dust, with a palm and a pine behind him.

  On Anzac Day in Sydney we sang:

  Lord of our far-flung battle-line,

  Beneath whose awful Hand we hold

  Dominion over palm and pine –

  I was taken into custody by Mr Foot, the American principal with uneven teeth and a billiard ball head who faked being a friend to kids and goggled at Babette.

  Once inducted into the prison, I had to go back every day.

  The teachers were all called ‘Sir’, but not by me. Jess loved school and galloped to the bus as soon as it pulled up at Paramount Apartments. He acquired a Yankee accent within two weeks of enrolling. Everything was ‘stellar’ or ‘radical’.

  I made no such concessions. It was as I thought; the boys were already in bunches. I’d already stopped trying to make a real friend by the time I was eight. We’d moved too often. It was like that song about having been everywhere. Bondi, Asquith, Bexley, Curl Curl, Fiddletown, Narrabeen, Turramurra, Parramatta and … Woolloomooloo. The boys at the American International School could get on with me or bug off.

  Jess let his schoolmates pull the blond hairs on his arms and head. He gave them nipple twists in return, and they respected him for it. He ditched me and sat at the front of the school bus, which creaked up our street every morning. I understood. He had to survive. I sat up the back, shrouded in a beanie and sweater, arms folded, hunched over my own secret self.

  Jess put his hand over his heart for the American national anthem and sang with embarrassing enthusiasm, his eyes on the flag as if its white stars were his. ‘The stirs and stripes,’ I called that rag we were supposed to revere. I held my hands by my side and refused to even mouth the words. It wasn’t my country. I didn’t sing ‘God Save the Queen’ at home either, because if I wanted to save anyone, it wasn’t her.

  After about a week of this, a whiny boy elbowed me. ‘I’ll tell Sir.’

  ‘You’re so uncool,’ Jess complained. The uptight dick with the elbow was Brendan, one of the identical twins who’d made friends with Jess. He and his brother, Dom, were both wiseguys with crew cuts, but Brendan had a big mole on his nose that made him both ugly and mean. He flicked me with his fingers, making sure it stung, and then shopped me to the principal for not singing their poxy anthem.

  Mr Foot gnashed his wonky choppers at me. ‘You’re at an American school now, so abide by the rules.’

  Babette wrote him a note, asking for me to be excused from singing.

  He called me in and treated me to another gruesome dental display, this time through a smile. ‘I remember your stepmother. She’s a fine woman. If she comes to talk it over, perhaps we can arrange something.’

  Babette brought him a bottle of Scotch and they had what Mr Foot called a snifter together. She came out fanning her breath.

  ‘Don’t like whiskey, but the job’s done. Funny Foot said you should stay up the back where no-one can see you. As long as you stand as a sign of respect, you won’t have to sing.’

  Phew! Sometimes I wished I could believe in the same things other people did, like that there was a whole nation of brave citizens who were all free and gave off a big glow from singing about a piece of cloth, but the rogue gonad made that impossible. Jess didn’t have one. He was picking up Arabic at a gallop because, he said, ‘It’s got the best swear words.’ He could make the sweetest words sound obscene.

  ‘Bloody chameleon.’ Lachlan chuckled and ruffled his hair. The kid’s teeth were crooked, his nose curved to one side and splotched with big orange freckles, but this lopsidedness only added to Jess’s charms for his many admirers. Emotion came easily to his face. This openness touched something in people. When an adult patted him on the head, he responded by pretending to be a drooling dog, hands held like limp paws.

  Every morning I’d do a circuit of the bus, checking that the wheels wouldn’t fall off, while the boys inside yelled put-downs like ‘Screw loose!’ at me. I made out it was water off a duck’s quack. Crack. No, back.

  I sat with the two cushions on the back seat that the driver trusted to keep him alive. ‘One for God, one for the devil. To make our journey safe, Inshallah,’ he’d said. So it was Allah, me and the devil riding together, as apples and pencils rolled down the aisle.

  Jess persuaded the driver to stop at small dark shops so he could play the little suck-up and buy the other boys sweets. I suspected he was paying the geezer baksheesh with money nicked from Dad’s wallet. He’d worked out the Lebanese system, as if he was born to it. He mixed aspirin and K-Cola together, shaking the bottle so it fizzed copper bubbles in the tar of the liquid.

  ‘Look. Makes you drunk as a skunk.’ He weaved down the bus aisle, setting off hooting. I could see the Lebanese kids were a bit frightened of his extremity. They came from milder families; their parents weren’t booze-heads. I flashed him warning looks from the back of the bus; he just grinned at me and shrugged.

  I was the only one who noticed the driver had painted over the school name on the sides of the bus.

  ‘Just a precaution. Don’t want pot shots being taken just because the school’s American,’ my science teacher, Mr Stickler, said.

  He was married to a Lebanese Jewish lady and they attended the synagogue in Beirut. He became my only human friend at school. He asked me to feed the mice he kept in the science lab for experiments. They became my other friends. They lived in two plastic boxes, with wire on top.

  ‘Whites this side, browns that. Divided into men’s and women’s quarters. The two genders lead segregated lives, like the ancient Arabs. We use these fellas for genetics experiments. All you have to do, Oliver, is keep the mice in their respective compartments, feed them and clean up after them. Okay?’

  ‘Yeah. Like with silkworms. My brother and I used to have those.’ I tried to sound cool. ‘Do they have to die? For the experiments?’

  ‘No. They make babies.’

  I blushed. The rogue gonad stopped me from saying another word and Mr Stickler could see it. ‘Believe me, it comes naturally.’ He winked.

  10

  Levitation

  A car bomb exploded near Hamra Street, over the hill from our laneway. It killed a man who had climbed a ladder to prune dead brown palm fronds, in readiness for spring, the newspaper said. I joined the sticky-beaks circling the maroon-black patch at the foot of the tree. I’d seen blood-clumped sawdust like that in a Bondi butcher’s. The thought that this was left by a man made me faintly cold and ill.

  ‘What’s going on, Lachlan?’ Babette shivered.

  ‘Honey, I thought that Israeli airport bust-up would spark a flash of anger that would fade. But it’s widened the splits here. Lebanon’s just got to get rid of the confessional system. If every poor bastard’s ID card lists religion, it can be a death warrant when there are fanatics at a roadblock …’

&
nbsp; ‘But why bomb a tree in Beirut?’

  ‘I don’t think they were aiming at the tree, lovely legs. I don’t know what our arborist did. Maybe he just got dealt a bad deck. There are so many stirrers. There’s a new religious leader, an imam, whipping up trouble. Some Lebanese Muslims are joining the Palestinians to counter the Phalangists. The players on the ground are afraid of the big outsiders. Israel could punish Lebanon for harbouring Palestinian fighters. The Americans worry that Egypt and the Russians could get too big a toehold. Syria might invade. With all those fears on top of religious fault lines, it’s not too hard to destabilise little Lebanon.’

  I wanted Babette to realise that I knew a thing or two about this part of the world. ‘They need Al Orentz.’

  Dad shook his head. ‘His day was more than fifty years ago. The mess he got into was way out in the deserts of Araby. That was less about God and more about Empire. Gawd, why am I paying a ransom to the Americans for your education?’

  ‘Beats me.’ I would have been happy if he’d stopped. School was getting in the way of my plan to kiss Sabine. I began to rub my lucky rock in my pocket for help. I would hold it and allow a thought to become a whisper, but it let me know my luck was limited. At every touch, the sand crumbled and my rock dwindled.

  It worked, though. Sandstone magic. I got a date with Sabine. As I loitered in the lobby one afternoon, she hissed: ‘You got tzigara?’

  ‘Ciggies. Yes. Upstairs. I can bring you some.’

  ‘Go up to bird apartment. I meet you there tomorrow. Your bus come home from school. You go up,’ she ordered.

  ‘You mean the rooftop?’ I whispered, but she’d shut her door. I soared up the stairs, hugged the dog waiting outside our apartment and chucked it a chunk of Best British Beef that Dad had brought from London. The dog licked the blood-spattered doormat and asked for more.

  That night, I levitated above Sabine, both of us wrapped in the scents and sounds of Beirut: the burnt caramel of sweet coffee, the bell peals in the night. As I nestled in bed, I could feel her seven floors below, her hair lapping over her pillow, exhaling a wobbly sigh and biting her troubled lip as she pondered telling Abdo she had to leave him for another – me.